PlayTV – a quick response to a quirky update

Some readers of The Register passed on news of a problem they’ve been experiencing with PlayTV – the add-on to the PS3 that lets you use it to watch and record Freeview.

It appears that, after updating to version 2.02, some users are experiencing PlayTV hanging, and the advice from Sony’s support line is that you should re-install the software.

It’s important to point out that if you do that, then your recordings will be lost; you need to export them to XMB first if you want to keep them.

I’ve written a news item about this for RegHardware, and in that I described the Sony response as a “corporate shrug.” I think, actually, that’s being quite generous. Users have paid for an update; it’s clearly affected enough of them for Sony to say it’s heard about the problem, and this is their response:

We are aware of the issues some PlayTV users are currently experiencing. We will fix these issues through future updates.

When I first received that response on Friday afternoon, I pointed out to the PR that I didn’t think it would be terribly appreciated by the users affected, and that it amounts to little more than “we know, we’ll get to it sometime.”

Specifically, is there a time-frame for an update? Will those who paid for the current version be able to get a refund? And can Sony suggest any work-arounds in the meantime? I think those are all reasonable questions.

The PR told me he’d try to get an answer on Monday; in the event, I waited until Tuesday lunchtime before submitting the story.

As some commenters on the RegHardware story point out, it’s hard to get a feel for exactly how many people are affected; but certainly some are – and whether it’s a dozen people, 120 or 1,200 that have ended up losing all their recordings as a result of re-installing, or simply not getting what they thought they would when they paid for an upgrade, I do think that they deserve a little more information than they’re getting at the moment.