Live pause on the Virgin 360 mini

[robbiederby]

I'm loving the new Virgin 360, however, the live pause feature on the Mini box is very poor... if I'm watching TV in the bedroom and my mum rings, I need a lot longer than 4 and a half minutes. That is a real oversight. 

The two boxes share the same hard disk for recordings, why not the same drive for live TV pause?

If that can't be done, can it be made so we can plug a USB drive in the back of the box and use that as temporary storage? Because 270 seconds just isn't enough.

[Ernie_C]

The mini box has no hard disk.

Your only option if you have to disappear is to press Record.

[robbiederby]

Yes I know this... neither does the Sky Q Mini box, but that uses the hard disk of the main box when on pause... why can't the 360 box?

Come on Virgin, you can do better than this.

[Ernie_C]

If I understand correctly, each system has its own functions, dependent on its implementation.

SkyQ Mini, I believe, has no tuners and relies on the main box so no main box, no TV service.

TV 360 Mini has its own tuner so will continue if your main box is broken.

If you want a longer pause then take the Sky implementation.

Personally, if I had a MultiRoom box and wanted to pause it, I would press Record.

[robbiederby]

Then what was the point of putting the pause button on the mini box remote at all? It's pretty much useless to most people? 

It's a total oversight, and whilst yes, you're correct, the Sky Q mini box doesn't have its own tuner per-se, it tells the main box to use one of it's tuners to send the required channel to the Sky Q mini box to view whilst everything else is recorded on the main box.

The V360 Mini box should be at an advantage as the main stream is being sent directly to the box... it shouldn't be too difficult to instruct the main box connected to your local network to buffer the channel you're watching so you can pause more than 4 and a half bloody minutes of TV thus allowing the pause button to work as expected. The record button is for things you want to keep to watch later

[Graham_A]

The underlying reason behind this is that the Horizon 360 system was developed to work with cloud storage and not local hard drives.  This has had to be adapted for use here as the broadcasters will not currently agree to the cloud storage model.

So the system being implemented is a compromised hash up. 

[Ernie_C]

“Then what was the point of putting the pause button on the mini box remote at all? It's pretty much useless to most people? ”

That’s an easy one - to allow recordings to be paused.

[robbiederby]

It's barely long enough to pause to make a cup of tea... it's utterly pointless. If VM don't do anything about it I'll either be downgrading back to the V6 box or going back to Sky for my TV.

[roy247]

Unfortunately it's a one way ticket, there is no easy way back to V6.

[SC90NYG]

I've not got the TV360 yet (due Monday) but also not had TiVo either as been with SkyQ since launch.

The simple solution here seems to be why don't they implement a system whereby when pause is pressed on a non recorded show, the box instantly begins recording (even if it's just in the background) which would allow the show to be paused for longer. When the user is caught up, either auto delete the recording or present an option at the end.

Appreciate hitting the record button instead is an option, but why not make it more intuitive.

Just a thought 🙂