Virgin Media unveils new Virgin TV 360 box with voice remote

[What Hi-Fi?]

New set-top box delivers 4K streaming, but lacks one of the most popular apps...

Virgin Media unveils new Virgin TV 360 box with voice remote : Read more

 

[Cobrabay]

As one of the unfortunate early users of the Virgin 360 TV box I'd strongly recommend people avoid it. The hardware of the box itself is a mild improvement, more energy efficient, faster start-up, but the remote is a poor replacement for the old V6 one, far fewer dedicated buttons, it didn't even have a stop button, which means you are much more reliant on navigating on-screen. The software however is the real travesty. It has Minimal Viable Product and Public Beta written all over it. Compared to the mature Tivo-style interface of the V6, the new UI has much less functionality, and appalling navigation. If I could revert to the old V6 I would. This box is is so bad I'm considering moving my TV to Sky, even with the higher cost of breaking the bundle.

 

[xbian]

Thanks for the heads up!

I am on a bundle , virgin box , internet and phone which I never use.
Hardly use the Virgin box as there never seems to be much on TV.

I prefer streaming on the TV, Netflix etc. The picture quality is far better than the Virgin box.

If it was not for the wife recording and watching the two American dudes doing up houses , I would never turn the virgin box on!

 

[hackenbacker]

As one of the unfortunate early users of the Virgin 360 TV box I'd strongly recommend people avoid it. The hardware of the box itself is a mild improvement, more energy efficient, faster start-up, but the remote is a poor replacement for the old V6 one, far fewer dedicated buttons, it didn't even have a stop button, which means you are much more reliant on navigating on-screen. The software however is the real travesty. It has Minimal Viable Product and Public Beta written all over it. Compared to the mature Tivo-style interface of the V6, the new UI has much less functionality, and appalling navigation. If I could revert to the old V6 I would. This box is is so bad I'm considering moving my TV to Sky, even with the higher cost of breaking the bundle.

As someone who has been using Sky Q for 2 years, I would caution anyone against jumping on to that platform now.

Two years ago, it used to be very good - but this year they've been intent on pushing out a series of updates that have made the product worse every single time.

First of all they cut the mini player for an "expanded view" that is unnecessary everywhere it is implemented - yet they didn't expand the TV guide which was the one place that does need it. The "show centre" and "smart buttons" barely function (anything that tries to intelligently second guess the EPG data and what you are trying to do is doomed to failure). Then they reorganised the recordings menu so you can no longer see what recordings you haven't watched, and made it difficult to navigate by shrinking a lot of the whitespace that made it possible to see where the selection cursor is. And now they've removed the ability to stop Netflix content mixing with Sky Q content in the menus, so it's that much more difficult to find/navigate Sky Q content (I don't care about navigating / discovering Netflix content as I do that separately on the web and using Netflix watchlists).

Honestly, they've taken Sky Q from being a really good product that just needed a few more features implemented, and turned into a painfully difficult product to use, that is still lacking the features that they needed to implement.