Like Bill Gates in the world of computing, Rupert Murdoch will cede no ground to any of his media rivals. In deference to this driving ambition, BSkyB's annual results, published last week, show the outcome of an advertising campaign launched last year to boost uptake of the Sky+ box. The number of people using the technology, which records programmes onto a hard disk, rose sharply throughout the year - from 79,000 in March 2003 to 121,000 in September. By December 31 this figure had more than doubled to 250,0000, and Sky bosses want 315,000 users by the start of June.

Despite this typically burgeoning success story there is competition on the horizon for Murdoch: other "PVR" (personal video recorder) products and the increasingly popular family of DVD recorders, which can copy a programme temporarily or burn it permanently onto disk. This is a significant advantage over the Sky+ box, and the vast majority of other PVRs, which cannot create permanent copies. In fact, most of the things that were once the sole province of PVRs are now being overrun by the newer generation of DVD recorders.

While the growth in Sky+ uptake may be impressive at first glance, a quick call to Dixon's confirms that it sells far more DVD recorders than PVRs, simply because it stocks a range of DVD recorders and only one PVR - the not-quite-ubiquitous-enough Sky+. What used to be the PVR's unique selling point is that it allows users to pause TV programmes in mid-flow - an absolute boon for those with small children or lives prone to interruption. TiVo was the first company to launch a PVR in Britain, although it has retreated somewhat in response to unfavourable economic conditions. TiVo is still floating well enough in the US - thousands of people there used their boxes to make absolutely sure that it was Janet Jackson's breast, not a page from a chainsaw parts catalogue, that popped out during the Superbowl half-time performance. One of TiVo's problems was an advertising campaign that showed people "paused" in mid-action - a feature that held little appeal among consumers. Sky+, by contrast, has hit on the correct marketing tagline: "If you had your own TV channel, what would be on it?", it challenges - the idea being that with a PVR, you, not the TV schedulers, gets to decide what's on, and when.

The PVR can stop and pause a live TV signal because it intercepts what comes down the TV aerial, digitises it, compresses it and then writes the information onto the hard disk inside. When you want to view that image - perhaps immediately, perhaps delayed by a few seconds or a few hours - it reads the data, decompresses it, and forwards it on to the TV.

These days, DVD recorders can do the same thing using a format called DVD-RAM. (By the way, if you're allergic to TLAs - three-letter acronyms - I'm afraid you're going to suffer: this is a field of consumer electronics as badly afflicted by them as any in computing.) Using exactly the same digitise/compress/store/read/expand/send process as a PVR, a DVD recorder can also delay the signal you see on your screen or record it while you're not watching. Instead of a hard disk, it uses a high-speed erasable optical disc that can store as much information as a DVD - about 4.7Gb - enough for hours of TV.

All right then, you ask: are there any advantages the PVR has over the DVD recorder? Only a couple of things. The big one for Sky+ is that it carries an electronic program guide, or EPG. (I did warn you about the acronyms.)

EPGs are often ignored by you and I, but within the TV and satellite industry they are the stuff of vicious feuding. Last April, BSkyB considered pushing the two main BBC channels down the list that appears when you turn on your box, so that, for example, Sky 1 and Sky News would be at the top of the list and BBC 1 and 2 somewhere near the bottom. This seemingly trivial consideration sent BBC executives into apoplexy. But you probably didn't hear about it because EPGs are one of those things, like search engines and web browsers, that you don't query until they go horribly wrong.

The BSkyB EPG automatically updates the Sky+ box with listings of what's on, on every channel, up to a week in advance. If you have a subscription to Sky that's a lot of channels, and it saves hours of fussing through newspapers or listings magazines. But the Sky+ EPG isn't free - there's a monthly £10 subscription unless you sign up for two Sky Premium channels. On the other hand, blank DVDs cost about £2.50 each, so if you get through a few of these per month you'll be looking at a comparable bill. All in all, the EPG can seem expensive - although it is wonderfully convenient to be able to decide to record a program days in the future simply by scrolling down a list on the screen and then pressing a button. Compared to the pain of typing in a VideoPlus code, or even (horrors) the date and time of a program (as you have to on DVD recorders and other PVR boxes), it's very 21st century.

But soon EPGs are going to come to every box. Digifusion has announced details of a new PVR which will be able to decode Freeview (digital terrestrial TV) signals, and which also incorporates an on-screen EPG that is being put together by the Freeview consortium. It's in the consortium's interests to use some of its spare digital spectrum to broadcast an EPG, since what its members want is more people watching their broadcasts whatever machine they are using. Building in a facility that can detect and decode an EPG is thus an increasingly important facility for modern PVR systems.

I don't know about you, but although I'm quite capable of setting a video timer, after the first few thousand times the glamour wears off. For this reason, some of the forthcoming DVD recorders are throwing in the kitchen sink. You want to play and record onto DVD? That's fine, here's a DVD recorder. You want to have the capacity of a PVR? Fine, here's a 40Gb hard disk incorporated into the machine. You want an onscreen EPG? Here you go, then.

Such machines are only presently found at the high end of the market, with starting prices at around £700. But there's no doubt that will start to fall quite quickly - perhaps by Christmas the perfect present will be a Freeview-EPG PVR/DVD recorder.

network@independent.co.uk

Go to http://www.pvruk.co.uk/ for news and information on PVRs and DVD recorders

VISION ON: HOW HARD-DISK AND DVD RECORDERS COMPARE

Program navigation

Hard-disk recorder

By onscreen guide. Models such as the Sky+ have an 'electronic program guide' that tells you about programs up to a week ahead of time

DVD recorder

By onscreen guide, though to time-record a program usually needs a VCR-style timer or the VideoPlus system

Storage size

Hard-disk recorder

Hard drives are much bigger than DVDs, so you can store more programs at once - potentially 80 hours or more

DVD recorder

Limited to 2.6Gb (a few hours) for 'onboard' storage; a blank DVD can hold up to six hours at lower quality

Upgradeable?

Hard-disk recorder

You can put a new hard drive in, but you'll lose the programs you stored

DVD recorder

No, but if you buy a newer machine, your stored DVDs should still work with it

Are recordings portable?

Hard-disk recorder

DVD recorder

Yes, when stored on to DVD

Ease of searching?

Hard-disk recorder

Very quick through onscreen index

DVD recorder

Can be troublesome if you didn't label the DVDs correctly

Input from other sources?

Hard-disk recorder

DVD recorder

Yes - some models can take camcorder input and burn it to a disc

Output to other sources?

Hard-disk recorder

No, generally

DVD recorder

No. (Isn't a DVD enough?)

Can play DVDs?

Hard-disk recorder

DVD recorder

Of course - though if your friend's DVD recorder uses the DVD+R, and yours DVD-R, you might not be able to share discs

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