The Personal Video Recorder (PVR) has made its first appearance in Europe at the IBC exhibition in Amsterdam. A number of manufacturers and developers including Thomson, Philips, Pioneer and Mindport displayed the units, but the most sophisticated device was undoubtedly that proposed by News Corp’s technology arm News Digital Systems (NDS) and Pace Micro Technology.

XTV, first reported on in Interspace 667 in May, contains an end to end system for controlling and enhancing the digital content stored in the boxes using metadata stored in the MPEG-2 stream. It is anticipated that the first commercial units will be available next autumn. "Pace has shipped more NDS boxes than anybody else and we’re News Corp’s biggest supplier. Therefore you could imagine with an NDS CA it could appear in all sorts of parts of the world. You shouldn’t necessarily assume that this is a Sky product," said marketing director Andrew Wallace.

However, it is likely that BSkyB could be considering a PVR device, which could seriously hamper any plans held by TiVo or Replay to enter the market. Wallace said: "The trouble with TiVo and Replay is that they don’t have integration with the broadcaster. Imagine you’re the broadcaster, you’re not going to want somebody else to build a front end in front of you. You’re going to actively discourage them from doing that. What we’re doing is working with the broadcaster and we know that is a much more powerful proposition."

Pace was also demonstrating its home networking concept designed to solve one of the greatest problems facing satellite broadcasters: serving multiple TVs via a single encryption device and smart card.