Promise – The Ultimate Freeview PVR?

The PVR is the best thing to hit the TV scene since the end of Crossroads. It’s changed the way we watch our TV, and whether you have a Sky+, Virgin Tivo, BT Vision or one of the many Freeview and Freesat hard-disk recorders, it’s now increasingly hard not to get a recording of your favourite show.

However… now and again, we forget to record a show that we wished we had, or, more commonly, a friend or colleague asks “did you watch that documentary about fridge maintenance last night?”. Sure, we have the iPlayer, ITV Player, 4OD and Demand 5 catch-up TV services to watch online, but you need a net connection, and that don’t include all of the channels.There is a solution… a magic PVR…

The Promise TV Solution

This is pure magic… a PVR that records every channel, all of the time. The Promise Seven PVR plugs into your telly aerial and records all of TV and radio programmes from the 60 or so Freeview channels, and keeps them for 7 days. Imagine. Every single TV show for the last week, recorded, browseable and available on demand.

We’ve looked at the specs to find out just how much in the way of hard drive capacity the Promise Seven contain, but no luck. We can only assume it has a pretty massive amount of storage, and is recording the incoming Freeview multiplex streams without decompiling them. However it’s being done, it’s still an impressive solution.

Pictured here is the Promise Seven, with its distinctively different polished hard-wood case with its black acrylic top. The remote too looks a little unorthodox, but then you’re buying this for its awesome functionality, not its aesthetics.

The Promise Light is also available, holding three days of ‘everything’.

There’s only one down-side to the Promise TV solution – and that’s the price tag. You can pick up a basic Freeview PVR from the likes of Tesco for less than £100 that will record 170 hours of TV (around 7 days of just one channel). To be able to record everything on all channels, you’ll be looking to part with £1,988. Ouch.

Update 02 March: Now reduced to £995!

At the moment, Promise TV recorders are only available for the London area, and are built to order in the UK. You can find out more at www.promise.tv/products – Sadly, we won’t be buying one of these for review, however, if you want to see one in the flesh, you can make an appointment to have a play, in the Promise TV showroom in Ascot, Berkshire.