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Good news everybody! Virgin Media has finally announced details of its first TiVo-powered device. The set-top box will access the Web and show you 3D, high-definition and on-demand content, as well as learning what you like and recommending.
The box comes with a thoroughly respectable terabyte of storage, housing up to 500 hours of content. A built-in internal modem connects to the Web via Virgin’s fibre-optic network. The company is launching a 100Mbps broadband service in December, which is the sort of speed you’d realistically need to pipe in 3D HD content from the Intertubes.
Virgin’s V+ HD service is already a contender for our greatest gadget of the 21st century, and the TiVo user interface will make it even better. Our US brethren have had TiVo for ages, but it’s never established a foothold in Blighty.
Beautifully designed and easy to use, TiVo’s unique strength is it really is a personal video recorder. Unlike current recorders, which are dumb as posts, TiVo knows what you like and records stuff it thinks you’ll be interested in. You train TiVo by rating the recordings, until finally it knows you more intimately than any lover.
The TiVo-powered Virgin TV service is scheduled to launch before the end of this year. Prices are yet to be confirmed, but we’ve asked Virgin Media to keep us posted on how the service wil be priced both for new and existing customers.
Are you a Virgin user? Will you be upgrading? And if you get your telly elsewhere, does the prospect of TiVo have you looking to defect? Let us know in the comments.
Update 18 November: Virgin Media has released a teaser image of its new black TiVo box and remote. You can hardly tell, but it doesn’t look particularly special. The magic is all in the software of course, and we can’t wait to review it. What do you think?
