Forum Discussion

EHumph's avatar
EHumph
Joining in
4 days ago

Multi room - stream or mini box?

Hi, I am considering signing up to Virgin as my current provider services are due to expire. I have looked at offers on the website and selected multi room - as I had with previous provider. Difference being the previous provider offers a mini box that connects to the main box and is plug and play over WiF. When I selected multi room when looking at the virgin offers it states it’s a stream box and not a mini box When I had virgin in a previous property with multi room I had to have the coax connector in the second room. Is this still the case or are the stream boxes an alternative? I can’t find much info on the stream boxes and if I can actually watch live TV on them or if it’s just on demand content - for example could the main box watch sport on one channel in room A and the stream box watch live sport on the stream box in room B at the same time? id prefer not having to get the coax cables installed in the second room but want to be able to watch live TV on the second box. thanks for any advice 

  • Adduxi's avatar
    Adduxi
    Very Insightful Person
    3 days ago

    The Flex box is tiny and uses Wifi or Ethernet, they do not need co-ax cable, but are streaming only similar to Apple TV/Fire TV.  You can have up to 6 Flex boxes I believe?   However the 360 and "mini" 360 need co-ax cables to work fully, and the main 360 has an HD for recording.

    If you are in a Nexfibre/VM area, you will only get the Flex boxes btw.

  • Molly_T's avatar
    Molly_T
    Forum Team
    3 days ago

    Hi EHumph 👋 Welcome to the community forum! Thanks for posting. 

    Lovely to hear you are considering joining us. Hopefully we are able to help clear things up so you can decide which of our TV device and package options would work best for you. 

    Our Stream service (or 'Flex') is predominantly a streaming service, so it is optimised for watching content on demand, along with subscription based services (such as Netflix, TNT Sports and Sky Cinema) which can be managed monthly via your online My VM account. The Stream device itself doesn't have a hard-drive, so it can't store recordings or be used in collaboration with one of our multi-room TV device options. There are a number of TV channels available, there's a full list of these here 👉 https://www.virginmedia.com/the-edit/tv/flex-channel-guide and a bit more information about Flex in general here 👉 https://www.virginmedia.com/the-edit/tv/flex . 

    In comparison, our TV360 service comes with a TV360 box which does have a hard-drive. It's optimised for live TV, as well as streaming, apps, games and storing recordings! You can find a full list of all the channels included 👉 https://www.virginmedia.com/the-edit/tv/virgin-tv-360-channel-guide . You can have multi-room by adding 360-Mini boxes. These don't have their own hard-drive, but you can store recordings on the main 360 box which are accessible via the Mini boxes. There's a bit more information about multi-room 👉 https://www.virginmedia.com/tv/multiroom . All of the boxes for TV360 require coax cabling into the box, but they can use Wi-Fi for their broadband connection if needed. (They will require a broadband connection to access catch-up, some of the apps, games and online services included in the box functionality.)

    We can't help with initial sales orders via this platform but you can give the team a call via 📞 0800 183 1234 and they will be happy to answer any other questions you may have when going through the sales process. Let us know if there's any other questions you need our help with. All the best! 🌞