Back in February when Sony unveiled its upcoming digital TV receiver PlayTV, Sony that the recordings would be made in its raw digital format without copy protection. For example, recordings could be transferred to any storage medium or be re-encoded and transferred to portable equipment to play on the move. Unfortunately, Sony has now gone back to its old habit and decided to enforce DRM copy protection on the device, which means that PlayTV recordings made on the PS3 cannot be transferred to any external drive, PSP or PC.
So far there has been no explanation given for the decision to use DRM, particularly since many set-top boxes and especially PC based DVRs do not copy protect their recordings. With the new restrictions, recordings can only be played back on the PS3 or streamed to a PSP using the Remote Play feature.
The PlayTV device will launch in the UK on 19th September for £69.99 and the recording feature will be limited to standard definition programming. Sony plans adding HD support at a later time.
Now that the PlayTV will be crippled with DRM, from what I can see, unless one really wants to be able to record digital TV on their PS3, they would be far better off getting a PC based digital receiver which also costs less or even investing in a set-top digital TV capable DVD recorder.
