August 05, 2012

VM looking at bringing TiVo to all customers

In last month's investor call CEO Neil Berkett said Virgin Media continued to review the advantages of using TiVo as its single middleware. (Virgin’s low-end boxes currently use the ugly Liberate middleware, known as TV Navigator.)
Berkett said “We are already exploring non Cisco/Samsung devices at circa £100 to rollout elements of our middleware. We’re launching in the fourth quarter a companion app on the iPad and that will ultimately move to a full app across multiple devices. As we go further out in time I predict there will be more efficient ways of delivering TiVo to customers that is not a DVR box.”

1 comment:

sibod said...

Not surpised.

Virgin's offering is anemic compared to Sky's and only the delivery of the media differs. Tivo is god, but not a deal breaker for most.
Price and availability of content is.
With the intense hype surronding shows like Game of Thrones that are tied up on the only channel Virgin, Talk Talk, BT Vision and others are unable to carry, Sky are effectively dictating the terms in the negotiation.
How much TV content actually comes from without Sky?

I'd love to be able to watch some more content on Netflix or loveFilm, but apart from a meagre selection of reasonably recent films and TV shows, there's bugger all else on either. Step in Sky with a repackaged deal called Now TV and they get to charge 3x the price because they know they are the only ones carrying the more recent films - so the others have no choice other than to act as resellers of Sky's channels.

Sky have so much power that it's virtually impossible to avoid buying their products unless you avoid pay tv altogether.