[zekeisaszekedoes]

CONCLUSION

The Virgin Media TiVo shows enormous potential, and already has a plethora of useful features that can transform your viewing habits and minimise the annoyances of having to catch a program at a certain day and time, which certain people (myself included) are now loathe to do as we have better options available. Unfortunately, as good as the Cisco-provided hardware obviously is, clear deficiencies, inconsistencies, oversights, errors and so forth in the firmware lead to a product that veers dangerously between “polished, professional and fun to use” and “slapdash, amateurish and rage-inducing”.

Sadly it seems that VM haven’t learned lessons from their bug-ridden, practically crippled Super Hub product and are still releasing devices with customised UIs that are not beta-tested properly so suffer horribly when rolled out to customers. As a beta-tester for the Super Hub I can say with some authority the testing is neglected and leads to expensive headaches later (everything I reported on the device was ignored).

Fortunately though, the TiVo is nowhere near as bad and is usable on a day-to-day basis, even in light of VM’s advice to reboot it every three days or so. It’s just hard to escape the feeling that you’re stuck with a product that’s merely good, when it could be great, but that is somehow acceptable because the rental charge for one or more TiVos in a house is merely £3/month and the feeling that within six months most of the problems will be solved or mitigated.

Would I recommend one to you? Yes... just barely.

Rating: 69%