A Quick Virgin Media Tivo Review

I have had Virgin Media's Tivo for a couple of weeks now. I am not going to bore you with a massively long review of it as there are plenty of those elsewhere, but I do really like the system. The user interface is intuitive, I love the search functionality (Hey I found re-runs of Babylon 5 on FX - it must be good!), and even the recommendations are OK. Sometimes it's a little slow loading menus however never frustratingly so and the Youtube integration is cool as well. So a few good points and a few points where it might be improved. It can be improved with software updates over the wire after installation.

First the good!

• Searching for TV shows, Browsing through the guide and TV on demand, and Youtube integration as mentioned are intuitive and pretty cool. It's nice to be able to search for what you are looking for, as opposed to trawling through an endless EPG! Although text input is not exactly fun without a keyboard, but you get used to it and it's not as if you write novels on the remote control ;-). Also great that search is based on live TV as well as TV on demand.
• I love being able to set up recordings via Virgin Media's website. If you forget something you can set it from your PC. It's not exactly user friendly on a mobile device, as its a flash heavy website but it does work on an HTC Desire S web browser via WiFi. I could not get it to set a recording via the iPhone. The EPG dumbs down on an iPhone due to lack of flash support in the browser but it wasn't this that prevented recording it was the fact that for some reason, while on an iPhone it could not determine if my Tivo at home was powered on or not. Recording via your mobile as mentioned is not exactly user friendly at this stage but @VirginMedia on twitter did confirm that they are working on Android and iPhone apps to support this. Look forward to seeing those. It sort of needed as Sky has this functionality available on iPhone ;-)
• Being able to define wish lists based on show, actor, director or genre is also very cool. Simply add the name of an actor and everything that he is in will be recorded to the hard drive. Nice. Again you don't have to trawl endlessly through the EPG to find something.
• Although it's trivial I really love the fast forward 30 seconds button on the remote control. When the add breaks come you quickly learn how many times you need to push the button to skip through the add break to get back to the show on the exact right spot in the recording. For Babylon 5 this is typically 8 clicks every add break for those of you that want to know ;-) . Such simple functionality but such a bonus! You never inadvertently miss the restart of your show after the ads ;-)

On the negative side I really think Virgin Media missed a trick with Social Network integration. The Twitter app is pretty useless if I am honest. You can only see the last 10 tweets in your tweet stream which is mostly irrelevant if you follow loads of people. What I would like is an integration with the EPG such that you can share program details with friends and also an integration with twitter hash tags for specific shows. This would require minimal real time configuration on Virgin Media's side to keep hash tags for popular shows up to date but if the app then allowed you to follow real time tweets with real time TV that would be huge! So much TV now is shared in real time on twitter that it is an obvious next step for Tivo I hope.

Another small gripe is that BBC iPlayer isn't integrated in the catch up services menus. Instead it has its own stand alone app in the apps section. Why? Sure once you know it's OK, but iPlayer is catch up TV at its best so why segregate it?

It's still very early days for the service though, so perhaps it'll be introduced down the track. Overall it's a great start and the platform itself is updatable over the internet so it's forseable that loads of improvements are hopefully on the way!

I am still hoping that Google TV actually does something in Europe. Is it ever going to be released here? Maybe some kind of announcement at Google IO this year? If it is it should drive competition and innovation further on Tivo as well so that would be nice ;-) How about developer API's such that Developers can create apps that run on Tivo as well?

Anyways gotta dash and I did promise this would not be too long ;-) Chores await!

Have fun!

Cheers

m