Forum Discussion

Drefsab's avatar
Drefsab
On our wavelength
11 months ago

Any future plans for multiroom stream?

Hi there I just took out services again with virgin im in a XGS-PON area so no coax. I took a stream box with my package and as I understand it its 1 per household. The question is does anyone know if there's any future plans to change this. Surely they don't expect to replace coax servies with single tv options? Most uk homes have more than one tv now days.

i took it anyway because £35 one off is worth a punt but i'll never be paying for extra channels on one box only and I cant be bothered moving it all the time so it will just be religated to being a freeview box for the spare room where I dont have an arial or sat feed. It just seams a little half baked as a product at the moment.

  • unisoft's avatar
    unisoft
    Knows their stuff

    No, instead of pushing on and going digital by making the stream the default box, they keep the stupid limitation on one box per account. If they actually got rid of DVB-C that is used for Tivo, v6 and 360 boxes, then the HFC network could offer faster upload speeds as well as download speeds. 2028 is still a way away for HFC to FTTP and meanwhile competitors are gnawing away daily at VM's legacy network areas.

    On the XGS-PON network, there is no DVB-C, so don't understand why they limit there. Must be a licensing issue with IPTV delivery possibly?

    • nodrogd's avatar
      nodrogd
      Very Insightful Person

      unisoft wrote:

      If they actually got rid of DVB-C that is used for Tivo, v6 and 360 boxes, then the HFC network could offer faster upload speeds as well as download speeds. 2028 is still a way away for HFC to FTTP and meanwhile competitors are gnawing away daily at VM's legacy network areas.

       


      Dumping broadcast TV en-masse would annoy a good 4 million people who would no longer be able to record content or use their existing kit. Not to mention that IP & broadcast distribution agreements are separate entities & VM has ongoing commitments to both with the broadcasters. They also operate area cable franchises from OFCOM for which Cable TV is a component, requiring agreement changes (& possibly legislation changes) to remove it from the existing franchise areas.

      OFCOM has agreed to VM transitioning to non-cable operations, but this will no doubt have many conditions attached that "protect" existing customers.

  • Joseph_B's avatar
    Joseph_B
    Forum Team (Retired)

    Hey Drefsab,

    Welcome back to the Community Forums and thanks for the post.

    With this its not something we currently offer, however if that does change you will be notified with regards to this via our website here.

    Joe

  • Tudor's avatar
    Tudor
    Very Insightful Person

    "The question is does anyone know if there's any future plans to change this." VM never ever pre announce forthcoming changes. Any info from users on a the board about extra boxes is just speculation. 

  • The migration to XGS-PON involves, amongst many things, a move to an all-IP platform. So, all STBs will be replaced by IPTV boxes which will almost certainly be a version of the Stream box. There will then have to be multiple boxes per household. A major drawback is that it will be impossible to record all live channels, just Google for Sky's Stream for an idea of what's coming.

    • BaleKaneSon1's avatar
      BaleKaneSon1
      On our wavelength

      i have sky stream, it’s not true that it doesn’t record, it records some programmes to the cloud and some it links to the relevant on demand app. 

      • nodrogd's avatar
        nodrogd
        Very Insightful Person

        BaleKaneSon1 wrote:

        i have sky stream, it’s not true that it doesn’t record, it records some programmes to the cloud and some it links to the relevant on demand app. 


        Some want you to have the facility, some don’t (usually the ones that want to force adverts on you unless you pay extra). This is bound to annoy a lot of customers who will see this as yet another “downgrade” in their TV services, just as they have moving from TiVO to Horizon.

  • You can get some apps for Catch-Up and record some programmes to the cloud, but there are some channels where neither option is available. The problem is that we are all accustomed to being able to record all channels, and being limited when migrating to IPTV is not going to be popular with a lot of people.

  • I'm in the odd position of a techie who understands why VM doesn't want to keep allocating a chunk of spectrum to DVB-C and approves of the move of everything - TV, VoD, voice and broadband - to IP but, as a consumer I'm not going to like Stream and will hang grimly onto my 360 box for as long as possible.

  • Contrary to popular belief, moving the video from DVB-C to IP doesn not specifially "free up space for more broadband".  The video bandwidth has to go somewhere !!  

     

    • Tudor's avatar
      Tudor
      Very Insightful Person

      "The video bandwidth has to go somewhere !!  "
      You need to do a lot of reading on DVB-C, DOCSIS and IPTV.

  • My information is old but I know that VM used to have at least 750Mhz of spectrum, and I've no reason to believe that this has changed. This spectrum, which is finite, is segmented into DVB-C for live broadcasts and IP (DOCSIS). VOD used to be in the DVB-C spectrum but was switched to the IP spectrum a few years ago. VM also changed the compression from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 which further reduced TV and video sizes. However the introduction of UHD broadcasts has resulted in the need for more DVB-C spectrum. It's all a bit of a balancing act to best use the spectrum until VM achieves its holy grail of delivering everything over IP.