We recently upgraded our Virgin Media setup which consists of Broadband, home phone and 2 x Virgin TV boxes to Virgin 360 for free (new offer 07/2024) and here is my quick review of the new 360 service we are getting. Now many won’t like the cost of Virgin when you go down this route, I mean our setup runs to £90 a month in the UK – but we get 900 meg down tinternet with 100 meg up, 2 x 1tb recording and streaming devices which are great as our “main” viewing experience is through an Onkyo projector so it is dumb and we need the Virgin boxes to help us get content to watch. I actually don’t think we are paying too much, though a little less would be nice, but ours has not risen in almost 4 years and as far as I can tell will not go up this year either. One thing to note is that I connect 1 box via ethernet and one into our home wifi which is boosted using a tp-link mesh system. This helps us out a lot as before the wifi connected box could struggle a little. As our Virgin hub has 1 gig ethernet and we have a nice network, this does impact some things and I just wanted to point this out…
2025 Update
As TV changes this review has been amended a little, with streaming services now at the forefront our Virgin 360 is used quite a bit differently than before. We only really watch sports live nowadays, and even a lot of the normal weekly/daily tv shows are now recorded to enable us to skip the ads. But they are fighting back, with the streaming services trying everything they can to make ad skipping harder, and then charging extra to remove ads. The streaming apps on Virgin 360 are all pretty decent nowadays, with the main ones we use (Disney+, Nextflix, Prime and iplayer) all working well, and we rarely have issues with buffering or poor quality. Our subscription now looks expensive but because we watch live sports like the F1 that is how much it has to be. Inflation has changed the tv landscape a fair bit, but we are still happy here and have no interest in changing right now…
Virgin 360
Virgins latest TV setup with voice control, better apps and streaming and a few extra features. Works well, and the voice control is excellent for my disabled wife! Virgin Go is also pretty good and it is by using ALL the available features that the value for money is increased.
Pros
Updated guide and search work well
Free upgrade – always good!
Inbuilt mic for voice commands
Cons
Still not the fastest system out there
Packages are good, but can get expensive quickly
Box runs fairly warm