Personal Television is a new technology that uses a hard drive to provide more control over your television viewing experience.  There are a number of terms you will hear used to refer to this category of electronics.  DVR (Digital Video Recorder), PTV Boxes (Personal Television Box) and  HDRs (Hard Drive Recorders) are a few of them. PTV boxes have the following features in common.  

• Live TV management - Live TV Management is the ability to Pause, Rewind and fast forward a show you are watching.  These features allows you to control Television.  One of the most common uses is Live TV Pause.  This feature allows you to hit pause at any time.  The PTV Box will keep recording the show and continue when you hit play.  
  

• Recording and Recording Setup - The ability of the PTV Box to record shows you may want to watch.  A PTV Box can replace your VCR by recording TV programs on their hard drive.   Because the drive space is limited, they also have facilities for archiving shows that you want to save to a VCR.
  

• Proactive TV Management - The ability for a PTV Receiver to proactively make sure you don't miss shows you want to watch. Personal Televisions boxes have the ability to help find thingsyou may want.  Features in this category vary from taking your preferences on what you like and finding shows based on on them to simply letting you specify what to record and then responding to changes in program schedules.

Who makes Personal Television

Three companies offer personal television set top boxes.  They are Microsoft/Echostar, with their joint venture, TheWebTV based DishPlayer,  ReplayTV and it's current partners Sharp and Panasonic, and TiVo with its partners Philips and Sony.

What to do before buying Buying Personal TV. 

When making the decision to buy a PersonalTV box there are couple of things you should think about.

Do a system inventory.  What do you want to plug into your PTV box.  You should check if your specific cable box or satellite system is supported.  

How will you hook your system up.  It is a good idea to sketch on paper how you will hook up your system with PersonalTV.  Remember that the the PTV box will have to go between your source (cable, antenna or satellite) and your TV.   Here are a couple of examples of simple sketches.   Make sure you have enough inputs to run any console gaming systems directly to your TV or Video Switcher.  PTV causes about a one second delay from live TV in order to do it's work.  This delay means that you can not run a game system into an input of a PTV box.

Record time.  PTV boxes range from as little as 5 hours to as much as 30 hours.   A good rule of thumb is probably to buy as much record time as you watch in one week.   In a year or so this will no longer be a factor as most boxes will probably be in the range of 30 - 100 hours.

Remote control.  Only ReplayTV comes with a true universal remote control.  Even Replay's remote is not adequate for a mid to high end system with many sources.  You may want to consider purchasing a universal remote.  Check out www.remotecentral.com for a list of good remotes.  I am partial to the Marantz RC1000 and Radio Shack remotes.

System Placement  When you set up your system, your satellite or cable box will become a slave of the PTV box.  This means that the PTV box will control all channel changing on the satellite or cable box.  If you are going to use IR to control ReplayTV or TiVo  then you may want to consider how you will place the various boxes.  These boxes must be placed near the cable and satellite receivers that they will control.  You should try to place the PTV box where it can been seen easily by the remote control.  But for best results with a IR controlled system you should try to place the cable or satellite receiver where they CAN NOT see the remote signals.  This way they will not pick up any random IR signals which can interfere with the PTV boxes control of the slave receiver.

Phone Connection You will need a phone connection nearby in order for the PTV box to dial in at night and get its program guide information.

Which system is right for you? Read the Ultimate PTV comparison and make the decision.  Which ever you choose, you will not be disappointed.