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Sky has beefed up its HD+ PVR offering with a new high-end box that offers a grunty 1 terabyte of storage. Large enough for 240 hours of space-hogging hi-def programming, it could store Avatar 88 times over, or 137 Premier League football matches — including the graphic HD mansitting with Jamie ‘Thomas Cook it’ Redknapp at half-time.
The new Sky+ HD 1TB box will set you back £249 — the standard 300GB Sky+ HD box is free when you sign up for the HD channel pack for a year. The old 160GB Sky+ box has been phased out, which means Virgin Media has to raise its game — its V+ box also offers just the 160GB. This is enough for a decent 80 hours of standard-def footage, but fills up very quickly when you start recording HD programmes.
Sky’s pseudo-on-demand service, Anytime, is also getting an upgrade — it’s losing the pseudo and launching proper online on-demand programming later this year. It currently works by downloading overnight a bunch of stuff it thinks you might like. This is hit-and-miss, as you can imagine, but it offers some stuff in HD that broadcasts in SD. Having that available whenever you like is a decent improvement. It’ll be called Anytime+ — Sky’s nothing if not an imaginative namer — and you can register to be kept updated here.
Finally, Sky is as keen as any other frightened media company to jump on the 3D bandwagon and it’s getting the cart rolling this weekend with a trial screening of 3D football in nine pubs across the UK. So if you wander down your local on Sunday afternoon to watch Arsenal v Manchester United, there’s a slim chance you may have to wear stupid specs to see what the dickens is going on. Sky hasn’t released the location of these pubs, so if a boozer near you is offering the game in 3D, let us know in the comments so we can give it a wide berth. No one needs to see Wayne Rooney in 3D.
Update: A previous version of this article indicated that Sky’s standard HD+ box only has 160GB of storage, which is incorrect — it has 300GB.
