Saturday 4 December 2010

Virgin to assimilate all of its TV customers into the TiVo collective. Resistance is futile.

Talking to PaidContent:UK, Cindy Rose,Virgin Media’s director of digital entertainment, revealed that Virgin plans to drag its entire TV customer base over to TiVo:
We are premium-positioning....We’re initially positioning this as a high-end product as a tier on top of TV XL - £3 more expensive than the standard TV XL subscription. However, we intend to migrate our entire television customer base over to TiVo as our standard product within a matter of years, and not many years. That means, undoubtedly, we will course-correct, refine and review packaging and pricing decisions as we go to make that happen.
Virgin's initial TiVo press release back in late 2009 mentioned that the TiVo software would be used on both Virgin's PVR and non-PVR boxes.

How Virgin plans to migrate its 3.7 million TV customers to the TiVo platform is unclear - software updates to the existing boxes is one option, but would all of the existing boxes be compatible with the TiVo software? And if they were, would they be fast enough to run that slick looking Flash user interface at a decent speed?

The other option is box swaps, involving lots of work for Virgin's Engineers, and lots of Engineer appointments being made by Virgin customers.

Whatever option Virgin pursue (probably a combination of both in the long run),  it will be worth it - Virgin's current box software is...well, bloody slow usable, but lacking in speed, presentation and features compared to the likes of Sky, and even some Freeview/FreeSat boxes.

With YouView (Freeview 2.0) coming soon (and bringing a nice looking user interface to the table), it was imperative that Virgin gave their box software a major upgrade, and if the screen shots at Crave are anything to go by, TiVo was a fine, if not the best, choice Virgin could make for that upgrade.

1 comment:

Dazz285 said...

I won't need dragging if the price is right..

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