May 11, 2012

Moving house...moving TiVo?

A question for any Virgin Media staff looking at this blog: if someone moves house from one Virgin connected  premises to another, can their TiVo (and all its recorded programmes) be relocated at their new address?

8 comments:

mattrose85 said...

Yes; I moved to a flat below my old one (it was still connected to a new VM point in the street) and moved my own boxes (a 1TB Tivo and a second Samsung box) and superhub. When the engineer came he just plummed them all in as they were upstairs. The viewing cards were the same so I'm not sure it new anything was different.
Hope this helps
Matt

Louise said...

I was told by an engineer they only work within the area you live because each box Is registered to the node that covers your area. If you move out of the area and into one which is covered by another node then it will not work and you have to have another box. As for recordings I'm sure they can transfer them. He told me (and this was last year by the way,) that they had a huge issue in Luton when they first started installing TiVo's as they couldn't get TiVo's to work when installing them as it turned out that a huge batch of TiVo's were meant for Nottingham but somehow ended up in Luton and because they were programmed for a specific node they would never work. He also said that each node costs £1m. Whether that Is true I don't know.

Square eyes said...

simple answer

YES - everything is stored on your hard drive

Richard said...

I've heard two versions of this..
1. If you are staying in same area then yes If changing areas then no
2. Works anywhere.

My personal experience with v+ and pre and post the main upgrade infrastrucutre grade to the new encryption systems a few years back, was both these answers... When it was v+ I moved to a new district and need all kit upgraded, moved back after the upgrade and everything worked.

I moved again with TiVo in same area and the engineer wanted to change the box due to some nonsence reason... I think he thought it was easier to upgrade. I had to point out the box had been working fine for two days and all he had to do was get accounting to assign the box to the new account. No technical work required.

So in short, I am 100% confident it works in region and not confident out of region. However, watch the engineer, they might fob you off becaus ether don't know so stick with putting in a new box for speed,

Only tip I can give is ge the guys to put I the cables to the right ppoint for you. If you are moving you can have them relocate a socket at install time and no cost. If they do it later they charge.

PBsmooth said...

I am a Virginmedia service engineer in the south east, if you are moving within the same network id (node area) then yes but if it's between ex Telewest & ex NTL or different network Id's within those ex company's then no.

Buzby said...

Yes - your Tivo will work in the new area, so a 'new' box is nonsense. It will need to be re-configured for the new node, and then validated by VM's system - so an official change makes it a no problem for the install engineer, it takes but a few minutes.

Unknown said...

Well, when I moved house (a different area within the same city), I had to have my V+, TiVo and SuperHub replaced as the engineer could not get them working at the new property. As you can imagine I was less than pleased at losing all my recordings...

Walter White said...

Hi folks,

I realise these posts are a bit old but I wanted to add this comment in case it helps anybody out there in this same situation.

We moved house this week and transferred all our Virgin equipment. The engineer came with two replacement boxes, a Tivo box and a replacement V+ box for the old one we still have.

I asked the engineer what was going on as the Virgin moving home website clearly says that you can transfer existing equipment so that you won't lose any of your recordings. However, the engineer said that because of the fact that we were now in a different node area that we would have to use the new equipment.

This sounded iffy to us as we prior to the engineer's visit we had already switched on the old Tivo and found it was in fact working and all our recordings were present. The only thing which wasn't working was the network side of things so things like Netflix wouldn't work.

Anyway, as we still had some equipment packed in boxes he left the old equipment with us and this is where things got interesting.

I decided to phone up and enquire about this as I thought the website was misleading if it was indeed true. I spent ages on the phone and it did not help. They transferred me and spent ages on the phone which did not help but they at least transferred me to somebody who could help who was a lady based in Swansea in some sort of tech support role.

She got me to read her the numbers from the new smartcards and the serial numbers of our old equipment and she sent some code to them which made the old ones work perfectly even though we moved out of one VM area into another.

So it's not true. It can be done. Don't believe anybody who tells you otherwise as I managed to get it resolved. Get tech support on the case though and avoid the moving home option when you call.

Good luck and I hope this helps somebody!!!