Virgin Media TiVo review

TiVo is a household name in the United States, supplying advanced PVR (personal video recorder) boxes to cable-connected households across the country. But despite attempting to break into the UK market back in 2000, it’s never quite caught on.

That was partly because of its high price, and partly down to Sky’s dominance of the pay TV market at the time. It was never a big seller in the first place, but when Sky introduced its Sky+ PVR, the TiVo stood no chance.

Now, though, the TiVo is making its return having signed an agreement with Virgin Media to supply the user interface for its new, HD-capable TV box.

Pricing

Those hoping for a replacement of their cranky old V+ box are in for a disappointment, however. The Virgin Media TiVo doesn’t supplant the old model, but supplements it, and if you want one it’s going to cost you.

There are two models available, differentiated by the amount of storage: 500GB or 1TB. The 1TB box is exclusive to subscribers to Virgin’s top-whack XL TV package, but whichever box they choose, it’s an extra £3 per month on top of the normal subscription.

For those on cheaper subscriptions it’s £8 per month for the 500GB (although since V+ owners already pay £5, this works out at £3 per month effectively). New customers, meanwhile, can only opt for the 1TB box at the moment – the 500GB box won’t be available until July.

On top of this there’s an “activation fee” of £50 for the 500GB box and an outrageous £150 for the 1TB model. It’s also worth noting that, after all this expenditure (£186 in the first year for TV XL subscribers), you don’t actually own the box. It remains the property of Virgin Media.

UPDATE: Since we published this review, we’ve discovered Virgin also charges an extra £40 installation fee on top of the costs detailed above. Thanks to ding_jimmy, KevPartner and tirons1 for pointing this out.

The hardware

That’s quite a wedge of cash, so what exactly do you get for all the extra money? Well, the first big advantage is capacity. Whether you choose the 500GB or 1TB version, you’ll be able to store an awful lot more TV and movies than on the V+ box with its tiny 160GB hard disk. That equates to around 250 hours of standard definition TV or 50 hours of HD programmes on the 500GB TiVo, and double that on the 1TB box. The V+, in comparison, stores a mere 80 hours of SD or 20 hours of HD.

The TiVo is technically more advanced than the V+. It still has the luxury of three tuners, allowing you to record two programmes simultaneously while watching another, but holds buffers for all three simultaneously. What that means is you can set recordings on two channels simultaneously, and pause and rewind live TV on another channel.

We also noticed the TiVo is distinctly quieter, with less hard disk whizz and whir than the V+. Keeping things discreet are the LEDs, which are again less obtrusive. Picture quality, meanwhile, is on a par too.

The only gripe we have on the hardware side of things is the rather limited connectivity. Take a look around the rear of the TiVo’s curvaceous chassis and you’ll find only find HDMI and SCART outputs, plus an optical S/PDIF for ferrying surround sound audio to a home theatre receiver for decoding.

The component output found on the first Scientific Atlantic V+ is long gone, and disappointingly there’s no stereo analogue output either, so you’ll have to take your stereo feed from the SCART socket if you want to connect to a standard hi-fi. There’s a pair of USB ports on the rear, but these aren’t used.

Interface and ease of use

What’s made TiVo such a popular brand in the US, however, is its ease of use and flexibility. And the good news is it’s clearly an improvement over the V+ box on both counts. It’s far more responsive to commands from the remote control, with none of the infuriating delays that so dogged early V+ devices.

The front end looks nicer, too, with clean lines and modern graphics, although we do wish Virgin Media weren’t such slaves to the garish company red – it’s liberally splashed everywhere, and gets wearing after a while.

The single Home screen is a big improvement over the Home/V+ menu split on the V+ too. From this screen all of the TiVo’s options can be accessed, from recorded shows – housed in the “My Shows” menu – to the categorised programme guide and settings screens. It’s all very clear and well organised – a far cry from the confusing menu structure of the V+.

It isn’t just easier to use, though: the TiVo boasts a whole raft of features that you’ll quickly find a godsend. In the My Shows section, series-linked programmes are stored in folders, rather than displayed in a straight list, which makes browsing your recorded TV programmes a far more efficient process.

While we’re on the subject, the series link options themselves are nothing short of genius. Any parent knows that recording kids’ programmes on series link can quickly result in a box full of repeats and duplicates. With the TiVo you can keep this sort of occurrence to a minimum, by specifying that the box only keeps a certain number of episodes, deletes a programme after a set period of time, or only removes shows when you start running out of space.

Another feature that helps no end with usability is the keyword search and associated WishList. Select Search and browse from the Home screen and you can use the keyword search to hunt through the programme guide not only by TV and movie title, but also actor and director.

Creating a wish list, meanwhile, lets you to tell the TiVo to record a series or film that isn’t in the programme guide yet – handy if there’s a movie you’d like to see but which hasn’t been televised yet.

Back to the future

You can also go back in time – not literally, of course – to view the programme guide for the past week, in addition to the more usual “what’s coming up” view. That doesn’t sound all that useful until you realise some of the past programmes have a “C” symbol next to them, giving you direct access to the on-demand programming from ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5.

You can also set series links from past programmes here and the box will pick up on repeats, so you might be able to catch that show you missed after all.

Virgin finally matches the Sky+ and gives you a way of setting recordings remotely: you can log in to either the Virgin Media website or the mobile version, and any recordings you select will be relayed straight to your box at home.

And, if you’ve any hours left in your day, the TiVo’s Suggested Shows offers yet another way of watching recorded TV. The idea here is that, by hitting the Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down buttons on the remote while you’re watching a programme, you indicate you like or dislike it. The box then processes this information and will start recording shows it “thinks” you’d like to watch, stuffing them into a special folder on the My Shows screen.

This is hit and miss: on the up side most of the matches seemed appropriate, tracking our TV watching habits reasonably accurately; on the downside, it didn’t recommend much new material, and the folder tended to fill up with a predominance of old programmes and repeats from the likes of Dave and Living.

Problems and gripes

A handful of niggles mar the experience: when hopping from one menu to the next, the TV stream you see in the small window at the top right of the screen momentarily shuts off.

When you’re browsing through the movie category in the TV Guide, oddly the year isn’t displayed, so if you don’t know the film and you’re recording it on spec, there’s no way of telling if it was recorded in the 1950s or the 1990s.

More irritating than this is that there’s no way of simply setting a reminder for programmes. And we’d also like to have a good moan about the fact that BBC iPlayer programming is not available in the TV Guide in the same way that ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 are.

You can watch both standard definition and HD shows, but you have to use the iPlayer app, found in the Apps section, alongside YouTube, Twitter, plus Flickr and Picasa apps for browsing photos.

Verdict

Largely, however, the TiVo is a resounding success. It’s more responsive than the Virgin V+ box and generally easier to use. It’s far more powerful, packed with clever features and boasts more capacity. The only criticism we have is over the “activation” pricing of the 1TB box – £150 is way too expensive for a box you’ll never own, particularly as Virgin Media is asking you to spend an extra £3 per month after that.

So that just leaves the 500GB box at £50, and we’d say at this price it’s worth an upgrade. For anyone who’s struggled with the clunky interface of the V+ box and cursed its restrictive capacity, it will come as a breath of fresh air, a shaft of sunlight after a summer thunderstorm. We urge you to order one as soon as you can.