Sony's new personal video recorder is based on technology developed by TiVo Inc that uses a huge hard disk to record television programmes and can pause live broadcasts and learn what a viewer likes to watch.

The device, which resembles a VCR, is expected to hit stores in the first quarter of this year and holds 30 gigabytes of data, enough for 30 hours of video, said Fujio Nishida, president of Sony's consumer electronics marketing group.It will sell for $399, about 20 per cent less than current models, Nishida told a briefing before the start of the Consumer Electronics show, a huge annual exposition of technology companies and their products.TiVo and rival Replay Networks kicked off the personal video market, drawing tens of millions of dollars in investment from entertainment companies such as Time Warner and The Walt Disney Co.

TiVo has already licensed its hardware design to Philips Electronics. Replay makes its own device but has a deal for Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd (Panasonic) to start manufacturing them.

Sony also launched a "Network Walkman", which is the sizeo f a cigarette-lighter and is its third portable gadget capable of playing music files downloaded from a personal computer.

Sony, which launched its original Walkman two decades ago, now has the broadest line-up of internet music devices of any company.

The announcements reveal Sony's interest in the industry, which has so far been dominated by smaller companies like S3 Inc.

The only other major electronics manufacturer to be widely marketing such devices is France-based Thomson Multimedia's RCA unit, which is working hard to push its Lyra device.

Such devices play music files that have been encoded using special software that compresses songs to a fraction of their original digital size, making them easy to save on a hard drive or send over the internet.

Analysts say the such new forms of distributing and playing music could add billions of dollars of business to the music industry within a few years.With 64 megabytes of memory, the Network Walkman can store about an hour's worth of CD-quality music.

Unlike the previous Memory Stick Walkman and Vaio ClipWalkman, the new device uses conventional flash memory instead of Sony's memory stick technology that stores data on what looks like a stick of chewing gum.