Sony just announced PlayTV, a combined TV tuner and PVR for the Playstation (more like TiVo) and will be available in UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain as early as 2008 while the other regions following following suit after sometime. The PVR cum tuner turns the already feature rich PS3 into a pure home entertainment system.

The introduction of PlayTV really will extend the already broad entertainment credentials of PS3, and makes it an exceptionally attractive proposition for the whole family,” said David Reeves, President of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. PS3 already provides High Definition gaming, Blu-ray Disc movies, music, video, photo album, web browsing and PLAYSTATION Network support. With the introduction of PlayTV state of the art TV tuner and PVR functionality, PS3 is now the best choice of home entertainment hub for the whole family.

Tivo’s CEO Tom Rogers hinted way back in march on the possibility of the HD series 3 “Lite”, well Lite means it will cater to the more wider range of consumers at a lite price of $299. Few Tivo fans broke loose of some specs and pics on the TiVo Community forums. The upcoming model should sport (these are rumors) a nice OLED display with THX certification but supposedly wont ship with the deluxe remote. A little indepth look shows that theBCM740x DVR CPU comes intregrated with MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 decoders, 1x dual MPEG-2 encoder, 2x Samsung S5H1411-based tuners, Samsung S5H1411-based tuners, 128Mb DDR SDRAM, well the 160 GB SATA HD should turn some eyes (used to be 250GB drive). Atlast you would think should a Apple TV be a better option or its your geeky love that lets you burn some cash.