Have you ever had a eureka moment, when two pieces of technology come together in perfect harmony ? Two apparently unrelated systems coming together to make your life that little bit easier or better ? I did a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been meaning to write this post ever since.

Unsurprisingly, the first half of this marriage is my beloved iPhone. I’m already a huge fan of my little friend (no filthy jokes please, I’ve already thought of them !), and it’s only getting more impressive as more apps get released.

The other half is a rather large black box that’s sat under my LCD TV screen; a Sky+ HD box. For those unaware of what this does, it’s for kicking high definition satellite content to a TV. For what can only be called an extortionate monthly fee we can watch, and record (two streams, so we can record one channel and watch another or record two channels) a plethora of channels. Some great (A dozen or so movie channels, half a dozen sports channels etc) and some dire (I’m looking at you ‘Zone Romantica’ and ‘The Style Network’. But I digress…..

Where the whole bag of tricks comes together is Remote Record. Remote Record is a feature Sky offers to enable people to set their box to record, either from a web interface or by SMS from a mobile phone. Both are pretty neat, but the iPhone means we can go one step further.

Enter TV Plus

This £1.79 application is where all the magic happens. With TV Plus I’m able to browse the television listings on my iPhone, complete with categories, favourite channels and a search function. Once I’ve found what I want to record I get the usual info: start time, duration and short synopsis. Hitting the record button fires off the command to Sky’s servers, and that’s it. The application allows you do do this with programs up to a week in advance, exactly the same as the normal on-screen EPG from the box.

I’ve used this pretty extensively since we had Sky+ HD installed, and it’s worked flawlessly. No missed recordings, no application crashes (despite what some of the reviews say on iTunes). If it wasn’t for Tweetie, this would possibly be my most used application on my iPhone, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

To use the Remote Record feature of your Sky+ or Sky+ HD box head on over to Sky’s Remote Record page and follow the instructions.

iTunes download link for TV Plus