Seriously, watching live television via Remote Play on your PSP? I hate you, Europe, and I hate all of you PSN friends in the UK who bitch about not getting cool stuff or waiting for games. Just kidding. Kinda.

In the midst of a whirlwind day of demos, appointments, appointment confusions and tension over the impending England-Germany [soccer] game, I went to Sony Computer Entertainment Europe's press conference at the German Games Convention. Since it comes six weeks after E3, the impact of global megatons were slightly diminished. A few Internet leaks didn't exactly help, either. Nevertheless, David Reeves (the UK/EU equivalent of our own Jack Tretton) managed to still perk my ears up throughout an exceptionally long press conference. Also, he didn't pull Chewbacca up on stage. That still weirds me out.

Interestingly, Reeves' Power Point presentation felt like playing poker with someone who has a huge mirror on the ceiling behind him and the wall above him. We could see all of the cards before he put them down on the table, from a general business update for PAL-Land to hard-hitting hardware news, software news, the state of the PSP, and plans for FIFA 08, before turning things over to his German counterpart. Yep, if I was less patient, I could've taken a picture of the slide and bailed out. But I wouldn't do something like that, even if my back hurt from toting around a heavy laptop bag nonstop for eight hours.

Now, I could recount all of the dazzling information from the business update, including the adoption rate of PS3s in PAL territory (which besides Europe, also includes the Middle East, Africa, and Australia/Oceania, among other regions) since the March launch, the fact that damn near half of the sales of both Resistance and MotorStorm have come from Europe, and the 2.6:1 tie-in ratio of the system, but you don't really want to hear that stuff.

And maybe you don't want to hear about Sony's casual successes in the EU, where women buy a lot of copies of SingStar, Buzz!, and EyeToy titles. Admittedly, I winced a little when Reeves said that on a weekly basis, the PS2 outsells the Xbox 360 on a 3:1 basis every week in PAL territory. I wonder what would've happened if the Elite dropped there at the same time as here.

Nah, the meaty stuff came as he talked about Sony's fourth platform (their words, not necessarily mine): PlayStation Network. That's where I got jealous. Reeves officially introduced Play TV, which has been discussed on our last few podcasts, albeit without an official name. Basically, it turns your PS3 into a Personal Video Recorder. Through free digital terrestrial TV providers such as Freeview in the UK, TNT in France, and dgtv in Italy, you can use a converter to get those TV signals, connect them to your PS3, and record live television. The catch is that we don't have services like these in the US, so as far as I can tell, we're pretty screwed on this deal, unless SCEA knows something I don't. To add insult to injury, you'll be able to connect your PSP to your PS3 via Remote Play and use Play TV to watch live or recorded shows on the road. And we were smug because we got the PSP six months before them. Am cry.