The Virgin Media Thread

Today many Virgin Media customers have recieved a box containing a TiVo remote with their name engraved on the side, asking to go to a website where they find they will get a free TiVo without installation or monthly charges, for life . Now what you would think here is, this is for people who pay for VIP, or have been long-term customers, right? Well, that's what it looked like, but now it turns out that people who haven't even registered for TiVo and have only been a VM customer for one week are receiving these remotes with the lifetime guarantee. As a customer of 9 years this August, this is a complete kick in the teeth and is in no terms reasonable at all in my opinion. I'm sure that if I had received a remote, my opinion would of course be different, but still, I feel rather let down.

Oh, and...

It seems to be incredibly misjudged, most people are already annoyed at the way TiVo has been rolled out!

Like VOD which they had about 5 years ago and 'DSAT' is only just starting to get? We essentially had the BBC iPlayer before the BBC website has the BBC iPlayer!


To an extent, but there's still lots of people who live in cabled streets but don't have cable

What's the point of a fancy new Tivo box if all the stuff you want to record is on a channel Virgin don't/won't carry.

What's the point in a fancy Sky + HD channel if it's a channel Sky can't/won't/never carry?

The average user won't be looking for "BBC 1 for North East Korea (West Sub opt)" or some shady sky channel catering a specific ethnic community, they'll want to record non i/ITV/4OD/Five Player programmes.

Maybe Sky Atlantic?

Rubbish - we had BBC on Catch Up TV - it was extremely unreliable (Eastenders would often be missed, it seemed to miss every other episode of The Apprentice, Dragons Den appeared occasionally etc.) and since it was just off-air recordings it frequently missed the beginning/end as a V+ recording often does.

The first Beta of iPlayer went up in late 2005. At least in ntl:home/Diamond Cable land we didn't have a sniff of On Demand until at least 6 months later, and even then it was only FilmFlex until VM launched I'm sure.

It always worked fine for me. It wasn't just catch up either, there was archive stuff on there right from the start including a load of Channel 4 programmes, again long before '4OD'.

V+ only seems to miss off the end of a programme when there's another 2 immediately before/afterwards and therefore the before/after extension can't be added. It's either that or miss the beginning of the following programme I suppose, how do other PVRs handle this, especially those with fewer than 3 tuners?


iPlayer officially went live in December 2007 (the betas were limited access weren't they?). I reckon on Telewest we got on demand - Teleport - not long before Christmas 2005. I think NTL didn't catch up until after the merger.

Incidently the Virgin/Telewest menus for BBC programmes was a lot better than the branded iPlayer one that arrived... and still is

But what if everything you want to record is on a channel that Virgin does carry? It's useful then!

Incidently, I personally have no interest in Sky Atlantic

The first * public * beta of iPlayer was January 2007, IIRC. Teleport, with Ellie West was easily July/August 05. When we got it it always worked, without fail. The newer, iPlayer branded one works intermittently.

Either way, it works better than the rather crap Sky service...

Indeed, iPlayer went live at the end of 2007, though I was part of the BBC iMP ('interactive media player') testing group back in 2005/6. iMP was the precursor to what became iPlayer; back then, it was essentially a peer-to-peer download tool - no streaming of any kind, but included a local standalone player, much like the current iPlayer desktop.

I'm pretty sure you're right that it was around the same time - the end of 2005 - that Telewest started deploying Teleport; I remember feeling terribly spoilt at having a choice between downloading on-demand via iMP and watching on-demand through my TV.

Didn't realise Richard Desmond's channels were involved in the initial testing.