Virgin TV
Virgin TV is the cable TV service from Virgin Media, available on its own or combined with broadband and phone. You need to live in a street that’s been cabled to get it, so availability is not as good as Sky or BT, especially in rural areas, but if it is available you’ll find good value triple bundles and an innovative offering. This is largely down to TiVo, a new way to search, browse and record TV, which mixes live channels, on-demand, catch-up and web TV and makes it easier to access them all. HD and 3D availability is good, although less than Sky, and catch-up TV is especially good on Virgin, with the BBC iPlayer and others included whichever TV package you choose. Virgin broadband is known for its speed – up to 100Mb in parts of the UK – and for offering actual speeds closest to the ones advertised.
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As Virgin is a cable TV service there is no dish or other receiver required on the outside, instead the property is connected to the main cable in the street and a TV box - and a router if you take broadband too - is connected inside by an engineer. These days there is a choice of 3 different boxes - the V HD Box, the 500GB TiVo Box and the 1TB TiVo Box.
Virgin Media has just over 20 channels in HD as opposed to around 50 on Sky Digital, so the choice is quite a lot smaller, but HD on Virgin is included in the price of your package. Virgin used to charge an HD activation fee of £49.95 but now it is done free, giving them the edge over Sky who charge an extra £10.25 a month to get HD TV. Some 3D movies are available on demand on Virgin but there is no dedicated 3D channel - this may come when 3D becomes more popular.
Both Sky Sports and Sky Movies are available on Virgin Media apart from the HD versions of Sky Sports 3 and 4 which you can only get from Sky. More about Sky Sports 
One of Virgin's strong points is catch-up TV, with the BBC iPlayer and the other main players from ITV, Channel 4 and Five all included with all TV packages. Not only this but if you have the TiVo service you can scroll back through the EPG for the last 7 days and any programme that's available on catch-up has a little symbol to identify it so you can select it for viewing.
Originally an American service, TiVo was adopted by Virgin Media in the UK in late 2010. The TiVo box is an advanced PVR (or personal video recorder) much like Sky+ and V+ with some very useful extra features. The TiVo box is available in 2 sizes, one with a 500GB hard drive to store around 250 hours of standard TV and one with 1 Terabyte to store twice the amount. The 500GB box is now given with no set-up fee or activation and the 1TB model comes with a one-off activation charge of £49.95. Here are some of the key points about TiVo and you can find out more on our