We swapped from Sky to Virgin Tivo when we moved house and so far I like it. Ok so the TiVo box looks very smart. It is black and about as big as a sky box or a play station 3. The buttons are small and there are lights at the front. It is not an ugly looking bit of equipment. The remote is quite big and standard to be honest. They basically look like the picture above.

The actual TiVo you can get different sized hard drives depending on how much you record. We went for the 1 terabyte one as we do tend to record a lot. This is great space as at the moment I have two films, thirty of Lotties programmes and then forty half hour episodes and around twenty one hour ones and I'm still using less than half of my space. I always use to reach 98% used on sky but not sure I'll ever reach that on here.

It is quite easy to use. There is a guide button on your remote control and you can see all channels you have on your plan for almost two weeks which is great. When you have chosen one you can then simply press The record button on your remote. Virgin gives you choices so you can record one episode, get a series link so you never miss one or remind you the episode is on.

Your recordings are all in the my shows which you can access from your remote. Now with sky you can separate them into watched and recorded but they are all in the same place with virgin which I think would be useful for them to change. You can order them via date or name and they do get grouped so for instance if you record 5 episodes of one programme you will just see the programme name and then you can drill down into the episodes.

With your series links you need to go in and change each one individually. It will automatically record only 10 episodes so I always change this to all and then you can decide if you want just new episodes or everything to record. There has been nothing I have recorded so far which hasn't worked.

If you get a viewing clash it will tell you and offer to clip programmes for you which is good so you never have t miss everything.

What I do like about TiVo is that you can record three things at the same time. I also like that it will automatically change the channels for you if it needs to to record. When it is recording you will see a red light appear on the box.

You also of course have all your on demand things so you can access old shows or movies. I've used this a bit and it is good. Some you do have to pay for but it always warns you. You can set up child passwords though which is useful to have.

Setting up the TiVo box is pretty easy especially as virgin did ours for us. They set up it in our rented house and in our new house but there are only a couple of ports so would be easy for anybody to do.

I also like the little features the TiVo box allows access to such as I player and YouTube. Also when etching a recording ou can give the show a thumbs up or down and you will get recommended shows sent to you.

My one issue with the TiVo box is that it can be very slow and sometimes I press the remote and it takes a couple of minutes to respond. As yet I haven't worked out why this happens as its not all the time bu if I do I'll let you know.

All in all though I like it quite a bit. TiVo has some good features and I think it is a smart system. I would recommend to people and I'm slightly happier with this than sky so alls good.

Kate