Virgin Media reveals it's "V6" UHD set top box

It took me longer than it should to establish if there was a reflection in that image, or the box looked like two boxes on top of each other. Regardless, this is apparently Virgin's answer to Sky Q. Little else has been revealed other than the image and the name, which appears to be called "V6". The response on Twitter is primarily complaints about how ugly the box looks, and that they weren't able to launch anything in time for Sky's 4K offerings with their football coverage.

http://www.techradar.com/news/television/virgin-media-hopes-to-spoil-sky-s-uhd-party-with-4k-set-top-box-reveal-1326421

As with a lot of set top boxes these days it probably looks bigger in that photo than it actually is in real life. I'm just glad it's still a TiVo.

That looks chunky.

Here are the Sky Q boxes in comparison (image from qbox4k.co.uk):
http://qbox4k.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/phpzqs0vp.jpg

If the remote control is the same size as the current one, then it probably isn't as big as it seems. Slick though, it most definitely isn't.

If it is to scale with the remote then it's quite a bit smaller than the current TiVo boxes. A shame really that it looks so incredibly ugly. Some design thought clearly went into the SkyQ boxes, it looks like absolutely none has gone into this box!

I suppose the performance and UI is what counts. From what I've seen of SkyQ it looks very slick and quick. Virgin doesn't have the greatest reputation for that - in fact their recent update has really slowed down my box, mainly when trying to play recorded programmes.

I hope no-one at the BBC ever use a TiVo to demo their iPlayer app

Didn't they claim a while back that they'd updated the UI so it would run faster, and there was hardly any difference?

It's really slow my TiVo box I am generally quite disappointed with virgins service way too expensive for telly.

My parents switched to Virgin a few months and I had the impression that TiVo was good and fast, but when I briefly used it when visiting them I was amazed how slow it actually was! From watching a programme on Live TV to launching Netflix and watching something there was incredibly slow, taking something like a minute - they have a Chromecast too and it is almost embarrassing how much quicker it was on that than on the Virgin box.

In day to day operation versus the Sky+HD box they used to have again it also seems much slower - the sliding animations from one screen to the next slow it down, and even the service menu is in a separate menu thing so takes a while to load.

I do wonder if the new box design is to make it fit in with the designs of the Xbox One and PS4. I have a TiVo and a 2008-vintage fat PS3, and they both complement each other well with the curved design.


To be fair I think it's always been a bit on the sluggish side, which disappointed me because the legacy Virgin/Telewest/NTL middleware was always quite cumbersome and slow, and this was supposed to be the fantastic upgrade we'd been waiting years for. Pretty much everything about the TiVo software is great, it's just a shame that the hardware lets it down. And in that time Sky have caught up and copied a lot of TiVo's unique features.


I don't use any of the streaming services like Netflix, apart from YouTube, but I don't think I would even attempt trying to load the YouTube app on it.

Can't take it for granted too much though. For now we have the great TiVo software with local recording to a hard drive. In the future we might have to use an inferior system that only lets you watch streaming content.

I don't think designing something to compliment the Xbox One is a good idea, considering it was widely panned for the way it looked.

Oh my, that's one ugly box.

I don't think anything remotely good looking in terms of hardware has come out of the cable industry, every box I've had with cable has looked ugly.