Virgin Media is Sky’s long-time rival in the pay-TV space, delivering TV coverage through its own cable network to its latest V6 box. Positioned as the king of the aggregators where you can get everyone’s channels for cheaper, does Virgin deliver?
First things first, Virgin TV only works if you happen to live in a cable area, which immediately makes its availability smaller than Sky, BT or the others. Virgin currently covers over 50% of UK households with a target to reach 53% by the end of 2020.
Virgin’s TV services are handled by its latest generation Tivo, simply called the V6. It’s a small, inoffensive-looking black box that will happily sit alongside any other under your TV, and adopts Virgin’s red-on-black theme for lights and highlights. It supports 4K, HDR and can record six shows while you watch a seventh, with 1TB of space for all your recordings – which is plenty given on-demand content is streamed not downloaded.
Fire up the V6 on your TV and you’ll immediately be struck by how old-fashioned the interface looks. The box is fast, meaning flicking between menu options, channels, scrolling through guides and other actions are quick. There’s even a previous channel button to immediately flick between two channels. I would absolutely take speed over a pretty interface any day.
But many actions are buried deep in menus. The TV guide looks particularly dated, and while you can create a favourites list you cannot reorder them. So you’re stuck with a lot of scrolling to do if you want to see all your usual suspects.
It’s also fairly complicated to navigate, but once you dig a little deeper you discover that Virgin’s recording and content handling is really powerful. Beyond simply setting a full season to record you can specify the quality, the channel, how many episodes to keep, whether it’s new episodes only or all of them and add a little time buffer before and after the recording. When you come to the end of a recording you the V6 box offers to delete it there and then, without having to go back to the recordings menu to clear it out.
Virgin actually tells you when a show was first broadcast in the TV guide too, so you don’t have the problem of thinking a repeat is new. It’s particularly useful for something like Midsomer Murders that has new episodes broadcast seemingly at random.
Search
On-demand content on the V6 box is pretty extensive too, because it supports most services and aggregates them all on to one box. You can play Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, practically every UK catchup service, plus YouTube and many other internet video services, although it’s on a bring-your-own basis as any required subscriptions aren’t included in your Virgin TV package.
The best thing is the unified search. Tapping out the name of shows, actors or similar can be a bit tedious, but results are fast and predictive. Clicking through you can see everywhere the show or movie you’re trying to find is available, both subscription and pay-per-view.
Search for Peaky Blinders, for instance, will show you four seasons on Netflix and a fifth on BBC, so if like me you were late to the show you can seamlessly binge-watch them all the way through. Bookmark shows you want to watch and they’ll show up in the My Shows section alongside recordings for easy access. Virgin’s WishList feature also allows you to record everything by a particular actor, director or show that comes on TV, so you can build your own personal Keanu Reeves, Tom Hanks or Jason Statham playlist.
You can also like or dislike shows, which teaches the V6 box what you prefer allowing it to suggest shows you might like or have missed. It works pretty well if you’re dedicated to doing it.
To aggregate everything under one roof, Virgin had made the V6 app-centric, behaving like a smart TV or streaming box. Catchup content is handled by the respective broadcaster’s apps, not fully integrated into the platform as recordings are. Go to view a BBC show and you are thrown out of the TV interface and into the BBC iPlayer interface, which takes a good couple of seconds. It then starts streaming with buffering and everything else you might have to deal with.
It also means that not all catchup content is in HD or in the same quality as broadcast TV. Playing Brooklyn Nine-Nine from All4 wasn’t in HD, and looked pretty bad – nothing like as good if I had recorded it.
It’s also worth noting that on-demand content is delivered over your Virgin internet connection, not through the TV cable connected to the V6 box. That means if your router isn’t relatively near the TV box you might have problems.
4K HDR
The V6 box can handle both 4K and HDR10 content, which gives it a leg up on some of the competition. Virgin has its own add-free 4K channel, which has a few select shows such as the Rook and nature documentaries. You can also get BT Sport Ultimate in 4K for live sport, but that’s it for channels. Sky Sports is limited to HD.
The rest of the 4K content generally relies on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube, with the majority of on-demand not available above HD, including Sky’s content, even if it’s available in 4K on Sky’s platform.
Sound isn’t as good as competitors, with large disparity between channels, which is annoying. Ending a recording from BBC and jumping to BT Sport requires some quick jockeying of the volume to avoid being blasted.
Other than the odd Virgin 4K channel and the pay-per-view store, the rest of the channels and content are third-party. The movies are from Sky, same with sport alongside BT. With Virgin operating as a middleman, it offers more premium channels from more operators in bundles than competitors, combining Sky Sports and BT Sport in one big sports bundle, for instance. And that’s Virgin’s primary selling point: everything on one box for less than the competition, illustrated by its claim that it offers the cheapest way to watch all football across Sky, BT and Amazon.
Virgin TV Go
Virgin’s recently revamped TV Go app is effectively the streaming equivalent of your TV package on a tablet or phone. It doesn’t let you watch recordings from your V6 box – for that you’ll need the separate Virgin TV Control app or a second V6 box – but does allow you to download TV shows or watch live TV over the internet, all apart from BBC shows and TV, which demands you head to iPlayer instead.
It works well enough, but even over a fast internet connection quality can be a bit hit and miss. It’s enough for keeping an eye on the news or football while cooking.
Observations
There’s a constant advert for some movie purchase at the bottom of the main user interface, which is annoying
Go into settings and everything drops from 4K to SD – which looks like something from 10 years ago
The remote can be pointed in any direction, but is a bit too uniform, making picking it up the wrong way round without looking at it a distinct possibility
Pressing buttons on the remote while it’s resting on your leg or sofa is almost impossible because of its rounded shape
Connected via cable the TV works even when there’s a thunderstorm or heavy rain, unlike satellite
The only Sky channel you can’t get on Virgin is Sky Atlantic, which means HBO shows such as Game of Thrones are out
Price
Virgin Media’s TV pricing can’t be bought without broadband and phone line and starts at £33 a month for 12 months with the “Big bundle” for Mixit TV (110 channels, of which 19 are in HD) and 54Mbps broadband.
From there you can build your own bundle, but it gets complicated and expensive really quickly.
Adding documentaries, drama, lifestyle or some limited sports channels are £10 a month each. BT Sport channels are £18, Sky Sports channels are £31.75 a month plus £7 for HD, Sky Cinema channels are £21 a month. Sky Sports and Cinema together is £39.25 with various other bundles available.
Virgin’s Bigger bundle includes Maxit TV with 230 channels (63 in HD), 12 months of Amazon Prime and 108Mbps broadband for £57 a month. The top package is called the Ultimate Oomph bundle, which is £99 a month and includes 270 channels, BT Sport in 4K, Sky Sports in HD, Sky Cinema, 12 months of Amazon Prime, 516Mbps broadband, phone line and a mobile phone sim card with unlimited data, minutes and text messages.
Verdict
Virgin’s V6 box is a mixed bag. It’s fast, but looks dated. The interface isn’t particularly intuitive, but dig deep enough and you can find some powerful features. You can get practically everything through one box, but you have to deal with an app-centric service, which asks the question as to why you’re bothering using the V6 box rather than your smart TV or a more intuitive streaming box.
While Virgin actually has full live 4K channels, in the shape of its own UHD channel and BT Sport Ultimate, it is the lack of 4K on-demand content for services included in your subscription that is the biggest hole. Sure you can stream Netflix or Amazon in 4K, but you have to bring your own subscription, which means you likely don’t need the V6 box at all.
So the power of the V6 box is about being the one-stop shop for everything and doing so is a classic jack of all trades, but master of none.
Pros: fast, one-stop-shop for on-demand, BT Sport in 4K, powerful recording features, HDR support, can be fairly good value if bought in bundles
Cons: dated and intuitive interface, app-centric on-demand can be jarring, not all on-demand content is in HD, lack of 4K content outside third-party subscriptions, remote is annoying
