Virgin Media's V6 - First Reviews

Or, more accurately, the first I’ve found. Here’s what Pocket-lint concludes about the new box:

It’s clear that the company has made every effort to take what is good about its existing TiVo platform and improve on it in every way.
It has clearly been inspired by Sky Q for several new features, but has also added a few of its own - such as the multiroom tech utilising existing hardware rather than different devices.
The future proofing also offers great potential, with Virgin Media telling us that the box could even be made compatible with cloud recording services somewhere down the line. And, for us, the speed of use over the existing TiVo box is almost enough on its own. It is lightning quick, easy to use and we’re looking forward to giving it a proper, real world work out soon.
Perhaps then we can judge whether it is able to topple Sky Q off its lofty perch. Or at the very least offer a credible alternative.

See the full review at Pocket-lint 

And here's what Trusted Reviews felt:

The Virgin TV V6 doesn’t look like much, but it is a massive leap from the existing software and hardware that the company has been rocking for years. I’ll need a thorough play through the interface to see if it really is as fast and smooth an experience as Virgin claims, but for now it looks like Virgin has managed to evolve its home entertainment offering into a modern and genuinely useful service. Watch out, Sky Q…

Read more at Trusted Reviews

Transferring recordings from your old TiVo to your new V6

There's been some confusion over this but, in a nutshell, you can't, so if you're swapping a TiVo packed with recordings for a shiny new V6 you will lose them when you hand over the box. However VM man Spiderplant does assure me that if you keep the TiVo as a second box and it's connected to the Internet you can stream those TiVo recordings through your V6.

V6 reviews welcome!

Hi all
Seasons greetings and all that from all of the team (i.e. just me) here at VMHD.
Unlike many of you I won’t be on the phone to Virgin today to order a V6 or two. The main reasons for this sloth are that my two current TiVos are working okay and I’ve got my left leg in plaster and can’t crawl about on the floor sorting out the usual cable chaos after an engineer’s visit. I’m also wary of new hardware (thirty years in IT does that to a chap), especially at this time of year, and my VM contract is up for renewal/cancellation in February so I may wait until then. Anyway...
If you have a new V6 and would like to share your first impressions with the VMHD community (the blog still gets over 50,000 visits a month) please email me your words of wisdom and I’ll post them here for others to enjoy.

Reaction to the "game changing" Virgin TV announcement

Well, that was pretty predictable: no sooner had Virgin Media finally let the cat out of the bag then the usual anonymous cynics were all over the cable forums berating the company for its lack of 4k content. Even the BBC put the boot in with some inaccurate reporting (later corrected). No HDR? What is Branson (sic) thinking??!! (Let’s not forget that HDR is not on BT or Sky Q yet either...)
I’m not saying the V6 is perfect in its promise, but it has to be a step up from the tired TiVos we all endure, surely? I doubt I’ll ever need to record six things simultaneously and I have no plans to buy a 4k TV anytime soon but a faster box is most welcome and the ability to stream my recordings to our second TiVo or to a device using the improving TV Anywhere App is most welcome.
And we shouldn’t ignore the fact that the box won’t incur a monthly charge. In fact the V6 is considerably cheaper for existing customers than originally rumoured. £49.99 sounds like a good deal to me, especially if they’re available to existing customers before the end of the year. I may even get an upgrade to a Superhub 3 from the dodgy wifi of my SH2, which would be neat.
The lack of a 2Tb disc is a little disappointing but it may come later - the TiVo “Cloud DVR” is not far away now, surely.
And let’s not slam the company for not having done any expensive deals with Sky or BT for their 4k sports channels. VM will most likely do what they did before with 3D and measure demand by making 4k movies available on demand for those desperate for the best. But don’t expect them to be cheap - they’ll be cinema ticket price expensive. A better bet may be if the rumoured Amazon App finally makes an appearance, but the announcement of the Virgin Store makes me think that this is perhaps less likely than we’d like.
So I take some heart from the announcement yesterday, even if it did fall short of being “game changing”. The Telly Tablet, for £299, may be useful in the kitchen or spare bedroom. The Store sounds promising. And I’ll take a V6 for my 1Tb TiVo for fifty quid - sounds like a good deal to me.
Where do I sign?