Virgin TV Anywhere doubles at TV Connect Awards

We’re proud of Virgin TV Anywhere, which enables customers with TiVo® to watch and manage their favourite shows on computers, smartphones and tablets for no extra cost. The early reception to the service has been fantastic and we’ve been working hard to give our customers the best entertainment-anywhere experience.

Since Virgin TV Anywhere launched, we’ve added 46 live channels online and 43 to the app, making the service by far the most comprehensive of its kind in the UK, and made the service available to an increasing number of devices.

We’re really pleased with how it is shaping up, so imagine our delight when we scooped the top gongs for Best Multiscreen service and Best Live online TV service or solution at last night’s international TV Connect Awards!

We’ve come a long way to get to this point and one of the biggest challenges so far has been developing something that works on Android. With over 3,600 Android devices, each with different requirements, the task of developing an app that works on all of them is no mean feat. So we started by supporting a list of devices that have been tested extensively and are already working on the next batch we will fully support.

Some of the challenges we face with Android are that devices may have been purchased second hand or been ‘rooted’, which breaks the digital rights management we are contractually required  to use. New operating system releases such as Android 4.4 (KitKat) also complicate matters – especially as Apple and Google are understandably keep detailed information about their updates under wraps until they launch.

Since the introduction of Virgin Media TiVo and Virgin TV Anywhere, we have seen significant changes in the way people watch TV. Already two thirds of programmes are being watched without the viewer first going to the TV guide and navigating the list of hundreds of channels to get to what they want.

With Virgin TV Anywhere making waves (over a million downloads and counting),  it will be exciting to see how the UK’s viewing habits continue to change. At the moment, around 60% of all viewing through Virgin TV Anywhere is done on tablets, 30% on a computer and around 10% on a mobile.

If you haven’t tried Virgin TV Anywhere yet and are a Virgin Media TiVo customer, don’t miss out – you’re just a few clicks away from enjoying the UK’s newly-crowned best multiscreen service.