Virgin Media CEO: TiVo impact will equal DOCSIS 3.0; October software update? Multi-room streaming?

Here's some TiVo related comments from Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett, taken from the transcript for Virgin's Q2 2011 Earnings Call Transcript:

I think TiVo will do to our video business what DOCSIS 3.0 to our broadband business. I think it will significantly change our brand, our perception and our ongoing delivery...

....Application is different. Application starts to create the glue beyond the raw horsepower of connectivity. Applications is nothing without connectivity, and connectivity is nothing without application, and TiVo is the best connected TV certainly in the U.K., and I would argue in the world because it's produced by connected TV experts. It's all they do. That's why we partnered with them. That's why it's actually launched on time, because a lot of our peers decided that they would build their own. It has a net promoter score, major of advocacy (over detraction) of plus 30%. If I had a customer base that had a level of advocacy of plus 30%, I wouldn’t be standing here today talking to you, I would have retired.

It is a massive, massive driver of advocacy. Our customers absolutely love us. Every single review of TiVo puts it as the best way to watch TV bam bam and I’m obviously deliberately using that phrase and I may not use that but that’s what they are saying and that’s what you’re seeing on the billboards at the moment.

It is an amazing product and it allows us to create the glue between the social strength, the TV, the personal screen your PC or laptop and the remote screen, your smartphone and tablet somewhere in between, because you will be able to access.

Neil Berkett also appears to imply that the next software update for TiVo will be in October, and will feature multi-room streaming from other TiVos in your home:

Just think about October, the second drop. The access your hard drive from another device. Your connected TV would by then know you. It will be recording things the things you've forgot to record.

He then mentions other, existing features of the box:

It will allow you to go backwards and see that somebody has deleted something that you didn't want deleted and you can undelete it; just lucky can on a PC. It will have applications like the Harry Potter app where we created an application around the launch of the first series where we had little clips and customers can go into Harry Potter and in they can go in and view and purchase Harry Potter. They can look at that video on demand library. It's got the intelligence to look at how (linear open garden), a linear walled-garden in video-on-demand are now selected over the top. It will do for us in the TV space what DOCSIS 3.0 has done for us in connectivity

Virgin Media TiVo App News: Spotify to be bundled with broadband for "significantly less" then Spotify Premium Service; No progress on TiVo-Lovefilm App talks

PaidContent:UK has quotes from Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett, who plans to bundle Spotify with Virgin's broadband service for a:

Very, very low monthly subscription...We’ll bundle it in to our broadband for significantly less than [Spotify's Premium Service for £9.99

Hopefully that will be the case when using Spotify with the forthcoming TiVo app.

As for Lovefilm:

Virgin-Lovefilm discussions for carriage on Virgin’s TiVo have so far come to nought.

Virgin Media's 2nd Quarter results for 2011: 50,000 customers get TiVoed

From Virgin's Press Release:

We have now started to sell and market our new TiVo service to new customers. This is the UK s first next generation TV service, seamlessly bringing together the best of TV, on demand and the web through an intuitive graphical interface. This enables us to launch exciting new entertainment experiences, such as we developed with Warner Bros Pictures to complement the launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 . We introduced a dedicated TV app that brought together live film premiere coverage with extra online content. We have also introduced a mobile app allowing customers to set their TiVo service to record shows remotely. The strong early demand for this service has matched our high expectations and, as of 26th July, we had approximately 50,000 installed TiVo customers.

We have also announced an exclusive agreement with digital music service Spotify, which makes Virgin Media the only entertainment provider able to integrate the Spotify streaming music service into its consumer offerings. As well as online and on mobile, we are also working to build an exclusive TV app which will make a catalogue of over 13 million music tracks available to listen to through home cinema systems.

We currently have around 3.8m TV customers, of which 1.7m or 45% are able to experience HD after having a further 131,000 customers take an HD set-top box in the quarter.

The results come after Virgin announced 50,000 pre-registrations for TiVo back in February. The vast majority of TiVo customers would have acquired their PVR before Virgin reduced the price of the 1TB version while standardising the monthly fee and ramping up the marketing advertising for TiVo.

Suffice to say that the cable company will be looking to increase the number of TiVo customers during the next quarter, in fact, Trusted Reviews report that another 25,000 customers are awaiting a TiVo installation. Virgin (and their customers no doubt) will also be hoping for more content (like Sky Anytime+ VOD, coming soon) and more HD channels. Me? I'd settle for some action from CBS right now.

Update for PVR Comparison Document: Virgin Media's TiVo vs V+ HD vs Sky +HD 1TB vs BT Vision+

BT Vision+ joins the PVR Comparison Document

The PVR Comparison Document has been updated. Several sections have been added (the main one being Access to Premium Content), some have been edited, and others have been split for clarification.

Among the biggest changes is that the document is no longer a PDF document - any old links for the PDF document will still work, but don't expect the document to look great due to the page breaks. I highly recommend that you view the content as a web page.

Another big change is the addition of the BT Vision+ PVR, that goes into battle against TiVo and V+ HD from Virgin Media, and Sky +HD 1TB from erm, Sky.

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.

Series Link recording issues fixed for Virgin Media's TiVo

Virgin have unleashed an EPG update which can be manually downloaded to your TiVo (via Home, Settings, Network, Connect to Virgin Tv Service now), and customers on Virgin's Help & Support forums are reporting that this update has fixed the series link recording issue.

You should wait around an hour or two after downloading the update in order to give your box time to index the data to be used for series link recordings. The fix will also be applied when TiVo next does an automatic download of the EPG.

My own TiVo is now scheduling series link recordings correctly after a manual download of the EPG.

Update on data issue with recent EPG download for Virgin Media's TiVo; No series link recordings currently scheduled

Virgin have been working on a fix for this issue, so far without success. Customers who have manually forced a EPG download this morning (and then waited a hour for the data to be indexed for use by the box) are still reporting no scheduled recordings for series links.

This issue also affects remote recording requests for series links, my test request to create a series link for Cougar Town (sent from my laptop) eventually resulted in a message on my TiVo informing me that there are no episodes of that programme in the EPG - despite 2 episodes of that programme appearing tonight from 8pm on Sky Living Loves.

Mark Brooks of Virgin's Help & Support Forum Team posted this status update eariler today:

Hi all, I have just had an update, the fix has not gone through yet, we need to get access to some servers to do this, we are trying our best to do this today, but as it is Sunday this may not be possible, therefore it may be tomorrow morning before this is fixed.

It has been escalated up the chain and we are working on getting access, therefore there is nothing further we can do at present, as soon as I have more information I will update on here.

On my box, planned Wishlist recordings (or at least, some of them) appear to be unaffected:

But planned series link recordings are, as are the planned Wishlist recordings for Haven (New episodes only) and Shark, but I'm not sure if those shows are on within the next 2 weeks anyway, pretty sure Shark isn't.

More on this issue to follow, along with a fix we hope.