If you’ve had enough of playing games on your PSP and want to catch up with an episode of Top Gear or the latest Premier League match, a new service lets you do so.

Sony has launched a joint venture with Sky (which has the same parent company as The Sunday Times) called Go!View. It enables subscribers to download TV shows onto Sony’s handheld games console. You don’t need to subscribe to Sky’s satellite-TV service, but Go!View does charge per month or per episode.

Once signed up, you select the viewing material you want and transfer it to your PSP via your computer. The exact cost depends on whether you rent each show individually (about £1.50 per programme for 28 days) or pay a monthly fee of up to £10. This fee grants unlimited access to most of Go!View’s material apart from the films, which cost about £4 each for up to a week’s rental before the files lock you out. The key attraction is that gamers who already own a PSP don’t need to devote pocket space to an additional viewing gadget, although they will need to buy a bigger memory card.

This is part of a bold move by Sony to reposition both its current PlayStation consoles (the PSP and PS3) as TV-oriented devices rather than purely gaming gadgets. Next month Sony will begin selling an add-on for the PS3 called PlayTV (priced £70), which transforms the console into a Freeview TV recorder. Last week it also upped the maximum hard-drive capacity of the PS3 to 80GB to make all this a more feasible proposition. Unfortunately, you cannot transfer TV shows recorded with PlayTV onto a PSP – presumably to avoid undercutting the new Go!View service.

So is it worth getting your credit card out to try Go!View? Possibly. Once you have finished grappling with its glitzy – and fiddly – web-site and then transferred some video onto a PSP, the quality looks surprisingly good on its 4in screen. The trade-off is that the files are huge: a single film takes up around 700MB. This won’t download in a hurry and could bust some ISPs’ monthly download limits. The selection of films and ageing TV shows isn’t exactly Alist either.

Sony isn’t the only company selling videos to play back on a gadget that may already be in your pocket. Apple offers a similar proposition for its video iPods, and Nokia is launching a service for its phones; 3 mobile and others have also been punting over-the-air video on phones for some time.

The problem is that few people are willing to pay up for this sort of thing. Even if you aren’t into illegal downloads, you can easily record Freeview TV shows (see box) or rip your own DVDs and then transfer the content to a PSP or iPod, though this can be a faff. You can also use the wi-fi connection of some devices (thought not the PSP) to watch video-centric websites such as YouTube, which doesn’t exactly leave you short of material. And whether it’s even worth watching TV on such tiny screens is the real elephant in the room here.

ALSO CONSIDER...

Pinnacle Video Transfer £120

Clever 5in box that digitises video from a TV or set-top box into files that can be moved to a PSP, or some iPods, without a PC. As it has only analogue video inputs, picture quality is inferior to that of, say, a Freeview USB memory-pen recorder.

Archos DVR Station £80

This is a docking station for Archos’s range of media players, which cost from £270. It can record video directly from a TV or a set-top box. Picture quality is better than in the Pinnacle model, even though its video inputs are also analogue.

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