Airtel launches digital TV recorder (PVR)


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Finally, Airtel has launched its personal video recorder (PVR) in the market under the name “digital TV recorder”. It has all the features TataSky+ has including some extra cherries such as:

  • Can record 100 hours of video (10 hours more than TataSky+)
  • Has HDMI port
  • Ability to record shows from your mobile phone using a Java based app over GPRS

The device is priced at 6990 INR. Existing users of Airtel digital TV can upgrade and get a cash back of 1000 INR to their account.

There is no specs page on the product’s website so we do not know what other ports this thing has. But a HDMI port means that this device should give the best picture & sound quality and should be ready ready for the HD broadcasts the DTH operators are planning to launch before Commonwealth games.

Based on the features mentioned on the site, it looks like the device is very similar to TataSky+. It has the same capacity (160GB) hard disk. I will not be surprised if Airtel is sourcing this from Humax, the manufacturer of TataSky+ boxes.

There is no mention of how many tuners this device has. It is extremely important that PVRs have at least two tuners so that you can record one channel and watch another one in parallel. TataSky+ has 2 tuners. At 6990 INR, we are going to give the device the benefit of the doubt and assume that it has two tuners.

The ability to record from your mobile phone is definitely a bonus. I have been longing for such a feature in TataSky+. Even the ability to schedule recordings from the web will be a welcome move by subscribers as it is extremely difficult to navigate through the crappy guides on the TV and schedule recordings.

Lets see how TataSky+ responds to this. A competition in this segment is very much needed to bring down the prices of these set top boxes.

[via airtel.in]


6 responses to “Airtel launches digital TV recorder (PVR)”

  1. Dear All

    I am very happy to know that that Airtel has launched PVR which has these unque features. Now i think airtel has edge on Tat Sky with HDMI and Mobile recording. But i want to know weather it HD content ready or not and along with that is airtel planing to come with HD content or not.

    As compared to others airtel is costly so are they coming with some bundle where in they can give best feature and best possible prices.

  2. Dear All,

    I have bought the Airtel dvr and all the functions are working fine.

    The main feature for which I bought is not working and that is the remote recording through the mobile phone.

    All you have to do is send SMS to 54325 by writing MGUIDE and Airtel will send you a link to download the software on your GPRS enabled phone.

    The problem is when I click on the link it says Download failed and safari cannot download this file.

    It can mean two things one the link is not functional and Airtel server has got error and two the application is designed for I phone.

    Both the reasons are not acceptable as Airtel is vendor of I phone and it should take care of all these things!!

    Very dissappointed

    • Swaran,

      As you have guessed Apple allows applications only to be installable from the Application Store (exceptions for a few by manually syncing). As long as there are too many prospective users for iPhone as a platform in the near future – Airtel will port it.

      Till the time, good luck using wife's phone (with Java)

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