±±¾©Èü³µpk10

Home entertainment company TiVo is planning an interactive add-on for its soon to be launched Personal Video Recorder (PVR).

The US-based firm will be selling PVRs to UK consumers from the beginning of October.

It is working with AOL TV in the US to bring an interactive service to the system, which is currently being touted as a revolutionary way to record television.

Tests are still ongoing with the interactive system's launch in the US planned for later this year. TiVo bosses have said it could be available in the UK in 2001.

Through the service, viewers will be offered chat rooms for their favourite programmes.

Howard Look, vice president of TiVo, said: 'We will be coming out with a combination of AOL TV's interactive system and the TiVo service next year.'

Right now, UK television fans that buy the TiVo PVR in coming weeks will get a new kind of programme recorder.

Using the PVR, they will be able to pause a live television show and continue watching it up to half an hour later.

The machine will also trawl through television listings to track down and record favourite shows and go on to record subsequent episodes.

BSkyB is set to offer the recorders in the UK for pounds 99, and it will charge a pounds 10 monthly subscription charge.

With viewers being able to fast-forward up to six times normal broadcast speed, commentators have warned that advertisers could lose out.

It is feared that consumers will leapfrog ads through the system's ability to condense a three-minute commercial break to 30 seconds. Research in the US has revealed that 90 per cent of PVR users fast-forward commercials, but TiVo and BSkyB are confident the system will not hammer advertisers.

Brian Sullivan, new product development and sales director of BSkyB, said: 'Advertisers will now have to target their commercials better. They have been promising it for years, but now they'll have to do it.'