Our previous opinions of Top Up TV Anytime last May were mixed. We liked the accompanying PVR (or 'Top Up TV+ DTR' as Top Up TV prefers) but found the on-demand TV offerings to be lukewarm unless you were a Setanta Sports fan or just wanted cartoons on tap to keep the little ones happy.
Since then the price of the 160GB DTI 6300-16 PVR has almost halved to £100 and a number of on-demand channels have been added or revamped.
There's also a 'new' box in town. It's still made by Thomson and looks almost identical to its predecessor, save for the 250 logo on the right of the fascia that indicates its sole alteration - a 250GB hard disc.
The rest is the same - a smart-looking fascia featuring a few operating buttons but still choosing not to sport a proper readout in favour of green and red LEDs. The remote is also unchanged, apeing Sky's tried-and-trusted effort very effectively, right down to the rubberised grip.
Expanded hard disc
Top Up TV says the expanded hard disc allows for up to 180 hours of on-demand TV recorded and/or programmes recorded, dependent on broadcast compression rates.
Unlike the current generation of Sky+ boxes, the hard disc is not partitioned so the amount of space you use for shows you've recorded yourself and on-demand content is down to you.
The 14-day EPG is retained, displaying in grid form what's on nine channels at a time while a side-scrolling menu along the bottom lets you view what's available from channels on the Anytime on-demand service.
Much like Sky Anytime, Top Up TV Anytime's version of on-demand is essentially 'push' on demand. You choose which channels you want to receive from an onscreen list and a selection of programming is downloaded to the box overnight around 2am (you can't record during this time). Day by day, you build up a library of shows to watch that can be viewed within a seven-day period before being automatically deleted. If you want to keep them for longer you can opt to save them permanently to the hard disc.
You can access on-demand shows from the recordings 'library' alongside recordings you've made yourself (all sortable by genre), where they are accompanied by an indication of how many days you have left to watch them.
