Virgin Media O2 UK Update Improves TV 360 User Interface
Broadband ISP Virgin Media (VMO2) has, over the past couple of weeks, begun to issue a new firmware update (v4.41) for their Virgin TV 360 service (platform), which introduces a number of cosmetic “improvements” to the Horizon software based User Interface (UI) and also some functional changes.
The new update, which in some respects seems to bring Virgin’s Horizon UI closer to that of Sky’s rival platform, is currently still in the process of being deployed to customers as part of a phased roll-out (we suspect it may take them a few more weeks to complete this).
The key changes include a new Home Screen, enhancements to the Catch-Up screen to make content more accessible and “improved” on-demand subtitles (i.e. they made the text larger and thus more readable). In addition, it’s now possible to seamlessly record films interrupted by other programmes, such as the news, which might sometimes pop up in the middle (previously this would have split films into two programmes).
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Naturally, cosmetic changes tend to divide opinion, and we’d personally prefer the ability to change the size of the subtitle text as the new approach is definitely more readable, albeit at the cost of obscuring too much of the content behind. But others may well disagree.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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It’s a step in the right direction, but still can’t beat Sky Q’s offerings. Q has more apps, better search integration and the UI is far snappier.
still no disney plus
It is coming soon I think, I am a Virgin media Stream customer and we have it.
Stream is basically a 360 by another name tbh.
The Disney+ app is now available on the 360 boxes.
It would have been better if they have made the fast forward & rewind work correctly first.
Shame they can’t fix the re-recording of episodes we gave already seen per the previous Tivo version.
Totally agree. Also where has the top line of icons gone including “Search” and “Continue Watching?”
Btw…you can now order the Hub 5 online.
How do you do that?
How do you order Hub 5 on line
Link was here, but they’ve disabled it now
https://www.virginmedia.com/offers/hub5upgrade#form
It’s a shame you can’t recover deleted recordings as you could before
Fast forward on the 360 : the bar at the bottom completely blocks the cricket information at the bottom of the screen so hard to find points of interest. TiVo system allowed this. Fast forward etc much better on TiVo.