12 things to expect from Virgin Media's next-gen box

4. Collections

For those who have flicked through some of the TV Choice on Demand and film VOD menus in the current Sky+ box you will have some idea of what to expect from collections. Essentially these are groups of related pieces of content that you may want to watch.

However, Collections from TiVo takes that to the next level, providing some timely groups of programmes and other longer form content. So, for instance, you could have a Collection of romantic movies that appears around Valentine's Day, or a grouping of England's World Cup football matches but you could equally more static content like Total Film's top 10 movies of all time.

5. Three tuners

In come ways the Virgin Media TiVo box may be better than the TiVo boxes on sale in the US and one of those ways will be in the amount of tuners. Currently TiVo (and Sky+) offers dual tuners – you can record two things but you then can't watch any other channel live unless it is one that you are recording on.

One of the key selling points of V+ is that it has three tuners – allowing dual record and a live third channel – and we'd put our mortgage on Virgin Media keeping the three tuner approach for its next generation.

6. HD for all

There's been no announcement but if we had a bottom dollar then we'd be ready to bet it on that next generation of all V boxes being HD enabled.

Currently all V+ boxes can run HD content and there's no added subscription, but we expect more HD functionality to be rolled out sooner rather than later, bearing in mind that Freeview HD is beginning to roll out to the masses and Sky's HD strategy is clearly working.