Almost half of Virgin Media TV customers are tuning into TiVo

Virgin Media’s smart TV entertainment powerhouse TiVo continues to add customers, with 1.8 million, almost half of Virgin TV customers, now taking the service. 

In the last three months 165,000 Virgin TV subscribers took TiVo, and a total of 679,000 viewers signed up over the last 12. 

Of Virgin Media’s 3.8 million TV customers, roughly 49 per cent now take the service. 

The total number of Virgin pay TV customers has increased slightly over the last 12 months, up by 71,000. 

Read our guides to Virgin Media TiVo and Recombu Digital’s UK TV Customer League TableWhen compared to figures from last year it looks like Virgin TV customers have dropped by around 25,000. This is because the new figures, produced by Virgin Media’s owners Liberty Global, only take into account pay TV customers. 

As Virgin Media operates a legacy digital terrestrial TV service, that accounts for around 12 per cent of the whole TV subscriber base, Virgin Media used to report customer numbers in their quarterly reports. 

Virgin Media spokesperson Gareth Mead said: “Over the past year we’ve seen strong pay TV growth, particularly led by demand for TiVo which is being installed faster than any other set-top box on the market. 

“At the same time our legacy free TV service continues to shrink and is now just 12 per cent of all our television customers. Interestingly, in the context of such heavy marketing and promotions at the time of the launch of BT Sport, that decline was the least of any period so far this year.” 

Virgin Media TiVo lets you record up to three programmes at once and lets you choose a 500GB or 1TB set top box. It also comes with all of the PSB catch-up services from BBC iPlayer to Demand 5, Sky On Demand, Virgin Movies, a unique YouTube channel a host of bespoke apps including Spotify and a recomendations system. 

The Virgin TV Anywhere app lets you remotely manage and control your TiVo box from your iPad. 

The standard V HD TV box lets you access the same catch-up content but doesn’t come with a hard drive, so you can’t record programmes.