Virgin Media issue apology for TiVo Series Link issues

After an 'interesting' weekend for Virgin's Media TiVo customers (details here, here, and here), the cable company today issued an apology on their Help and Support Forums:

Good Afternoon,

We’d like to sincerely apologise for any issues you may have encountered over the last few days with your Series Links failings on our TiVo service.

The issue was caused by a bug in a scheduled update to our TiVo service overnight on Friday, which became apparent to customers during Saturday. We worked across the weekend to resolve the issue and deployed a remedy on Sunday evening. Customers with TiVo should have already started to see their boxes automatically update and we expect all boxes to have the fix in place by Tuesday morning.

In the meantime, customers can force a manual update before then by forcing a service connection. To do this press Home > Help & Settings > Settings > Network > Connect to the Virgin Media TV Service now. It can take up to a couple of hours for the box to complete indexing the new database and for Series Links to re-schedule.

Once remedied, your TiVo box will try and find an alternate showing of the episode you have missed and set it to record.  To check this is the case:

1. Go to Home > My Shows & Recordings > Manage my Series Links.
2. Then select any series where you think you missed an episode over the weekend.  
3. For that series choose “View upcoming episodes”. 
4. Make sure that the alternative showing of the episode you missed is set to record.
5. If it is not set to record automatically then select “Record this episode also”.

Alternatively, if the programme was on the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 or Channel 5, you may find the programme already within Catch Up TV service. Find the programme by scrolling back in the TV Guide, via Search, or within the Catch Up & On Demand menus.

Right now, we’re in the process of ensuring that we’ve completely resolved the issue and that we learn the right lessons to ensure this doesn’t happen again. We'll also make sure in future we do a better job of keeping our teams and customers updated on issue status.

Once again, many apologies.

Stephen Featham
Director of TV Technical Operations, Digital Entertainment, Virgin Media.