virgin media
Virgin Media TiVo-Based Set-Top Box Announced (UK)
March 11, 2010
Virgin seem to be dipping their toes into any puddle or pond they stumble upon these days such as offering Virgin Media Broadband internet provision and using Google Mail for those Virgin customers, and since their venture into the TV market has been somewhat of a success, it now seems as though they are going to expand it further by building their next set top box around the current TiVo system.
In essence, TiVo is a DVR (Digital Video Recorder), similar to the likes of Sky+ and Sky HD which is probably one of the most highly demanded product of it’s kind at this moment in time. But it is clear that with this move, Virgin look to tackle BSkyB head on with their own box.
So what is TiVo? Well for those of you who have Sky+, you will be familiar with such functions as creating what they call ‘series links’ to your favourite shows and saving the entire season to an internal storage device. TiVo is designed with a similar intention, allowing users to save their favourite shows for future viewing, but the other main feature is that it suggests TV shows and films that it think you should like based upon what you already like – it’s a great system to find new content that you’ll like.
Continue reading »Virgin Media Broadband Internet Review
February 26, 2010
Virgin Media has been around for a while now and I am sure that you have all seen their adverts boasting about on fibre-optic broadband services. The problem I had with this was that it left me begging the question “how good is it compared to say, BT or Sky Broadband’s phone line based ADSL services? (Let’s not even get into mobile broadband)”.
Well now you are in luck as I switched to Virgin Media’s fibre-optic broadband and have given it a full testing in my own “special way”. On the surface things stack up pretty well. My old service offered “up to 8MB speeds”.
Using a download speed test, what this actually equated to was me receiving around 1 MB/s – Virgin offers 10MB, as standard! The difference is though what this actually equates to speeds on average of around 9 MB/s. That put into perspective means that I can now download a typical MP3 in about 5 seconds or a typical film (800 MB) in 12 mins. This is a huge boost in performance and put an even huger (I know that is not an actual word but it is very fitting) smile on my face.
Continue reading »GMail Is Finally Out Of Beta!
July 7, 2009
Ever since Google released its webmail service; GMail over 5 years ago it’s still been in beta for the entire time, in fact it had become somewhat of an ongoing joke in certain sections of the tech-world that Google Mail was still ‘technically’ in development and had not officially been released as a finished product or service.
Well it looks as though Google now finally believe that they’ve developed it to such a point whereby they can tear off that beta tag from the logo and continue to develop it as a proper live service (the service already provides more features than any other webmail service including Google Mail Themes and Google Mail Voice and Video Chat) – perhaps they’re hoping to gain more market share from the other big webmail systems such as Hotmail and Yahoo – has that dastardly beta tag been putting off huge numbers of potential users?
Continue reading »Virgin Media Unveil Illegal-Download Busting Subscription Service
June 15, 2009
Easily the biggest problem that the music industry over the last decade has been the exponential growth in the illegal downloading and sharing of music which attracts millions of eager internet users with the offer of free music and practically no chance of being caught/prosecuted.
Not that the music industry hasn’t tried – the corpses of dead attempts litter the musical history books for the last five years – through methods as diverse as tying tracks to credit cards and unpopular as digital rights management (DRM) but as of yet they have been unsuccessful. So step up Virgin Media with their attempt to solve the conundrum.
Continue reading »Sir Richard Branson Interviewed By Digg Dialogg
May 17, 2009
Digg Dialogg is an extension of the Digg.com social bookmarking website, that in a similar vain conducts interviews with notable, high profile people where the questions being asked are those that have been submitted and then voted upon by the Digg.com community. With the most popular questions being the ones asked and then answered by the person being interviewed, kind of like the basis of some of the stories featured on the Diggnation podcast.
In the past Digg Dialogg has interviewed people such as Al Gore, Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails fame) and other US political figures, however the latest person to be interviewed is Virgin’s founder, Sir Richard Branson – with the interview being conducted on the inaugural Virgin America flight from San Francisco to Orange County!
Continue reading »Virgin Media Customers To Use Google Mail
April 15, 2009
Virgin Media has today announced that it will be using Google Mail for its customers email service in future.
Virgin Media customers will still have email addresses which end with “@virginmedia.com”, however the actual system will make use of Google Partner Edition Apps – a collection of online apps that companies can use on their domains for improved online services, of which Google Mail is one – this will be the largest deployment of this system Google has done.
This service will initially be a pilot scheme, involving just the next 20,000 new Virgin Media customers, however assuming that proves successful, it will then be rolled out to its whole subscriber base – at no cost to the customer.
Continue reading »
