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).

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.