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Thomson DTI 6300-16 - Top Up TV Anytime Review

Author Jonathan Bray
Published 21st May 2007
Manufacturer Top Up TV
Price £139.99 plus £9.99 per month
Latest Price Click here
Features Score 7 for Features
Performance Score 7 for Performance
Value Score 7 for Value
Overall Score 7 for Overall
Thomson DTI 6300-16 - Top Up TV Anytime
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Television 'on-demand' has hit the headlines recently with both ITV and the BBC announcing a couple of weeks back that they'd be making all of their programs available on a catch-up basis online.

But these aren't the only developments aimed at changing the way we watch the box. BT, for instance, has just launched its Vision service, combining a Freeview digital TV recorder with on-demand movies and other content over broadband. Channel 4 has been operating a selective download service – 4od – for a while now.


Sky, meanwhile, has its Anytime service, which combines TV you can download and watch on your PC with a jukebox service, which records a selection of TV overnight and stores it to watch anytime you like. HD subscribers get this service for nothing and, very soon, so will owners of recent Sky+ boxes.

Now, Top Up TV, which supplies premium channels via terrestrial digital, is getting in on the act, with a service, coincidentally also called Anytime (I hear the pitter patter of tiny lawyers' feet), and it's this that I'm reviewing here.


What you get when you subscribe to the service is a set-top box – you guessed it, it's called the Top Up TV + box, just like Sky's – and this allows you to watch and record all the normal Freeview terrestrial digital channels. It has twin tuners, so you can record two programmes at once – and watch another if your telly has a digital tuner – plus a capacious 160GB hard disk inside that's good for storing more than 120 hours of film and TV.

The box has an impressive 14-day programme guide and you can do all the usual things you can with a Sky+ box: pause, rewind and playback live TV, watch a programme from the beginning while it's still being recorded, and set it to record whole TV series with a single click – for those programmes that are correctly tagged in the program guide of course.

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Latest 4 of 8 Comments

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comment John Curran said on 4th May 2009

I have three of thes recorders 2 at my caravan and 1 at home and I am now on my sixth replacement from Argos as the keep stopping and won`t switch on last night I went to bed to wa... more

comment Serena Douce said on 9th May 2009

I have had this system since August 08, have had nothing but problems with it, pictures freezing, no downloads coming though have tried to return the box several times and have bee... more

comment John Smith said on 25th July 2009

Another one for the list. Continuous problems with this piece of hardware when used as part of the topuptv service. Frequent failures to record caused by corrupted software downl... more

comment Greg Denwood said on 17th August 2009

I bought two of these boxes in July of this year in preparation for digital switchover in Cumbria. I have experienced problems with both, freezing, dropping channels and programme ... more

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