Digital Spy takes a look at Virgin Media's TiVo; Future software patch planned to increase dedicated broadband connection to 20Mb?

An article is online now at Digital Spy which has a close look at Virgin Media's TiVo box. Virgin Media's head of corporate relations Gareth Mead showed Digital Spy a demo of the box in London and explained that due to TiVo's advanced features, Virgin has to make extra effort to explain the benefits of the next generation PVR:

For someone who has never had Virgin Media before, this will take quite a lot of explaining, because it's so different in terms of how you interact with it. If you are a Sky customer, for example, the TV guide would be familiar to you but many of the other services would be brand new. When we do an install, we take a lot longer than normal simply because the engineer sits down with the customer and goes through each of the services. The difficult job our advertising and marketing colleagues will have is trying to capture the platform in a message.

In keeping with Virgin's plans to move their entire TV customer base over to TiVo,  the article mentions that subscribers on the legacy TV platform will be offered incentives, including possible offers and service tiers.

Gareth reveals that Virgin have a "scarily hectic" development programme to improve the service over the next 2 years. The article also states that despite the TiVo box containing a 10Mb cable modem, "Virgin has the ability to increase that to 20Mbps via a software patch for heavy users, or for future services such as 3D content streaming."

I'm speculating (not for the first time today) that the '10mb' cable modem is actually capable of faster speeds, but is limited to its default 10Mb via config files (like the normal cable modems for Virgin home broadband), either in the box itself or elsewhere in the cable network.

Check out the full article, which includes comments from Gareth comparing Virgin TiVo to Google TV and YouView.