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Originally Posted by Digital Spy
Sky has warned Virgin Media customers that channels including Sky One and Sky News may be pulled from cable unless a new carriage agreement is reached.

The satellite broadcaster has inserted adverts into the cable feeds of some of its channels inviting cable customers to call Virgin Media about the situation. Sky One, Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Travel would potentially be pulled from the platform if the two parties are unable to reach a new agreement.

A statement from Sky says it believes it is requesting a fair price from Virgin Media to carry the channels, which reflects their "proposed new terms and considerable value."

The statement said: “We want our basic channels to remain available to NTL-Virgin customers and we’re working towards a new agreement that will keep them on air. We want to avoid disruption for customers who enjoy these channels but, ultimately, it is NTL-Virgin’s choice. We’d urge cable customers who feel strongly about this situation to tell NTL-Virgin what they think.”

If you are a customer of Virgin Media Television (formerly NTL Telewest) and watch any of the Sky basic channels (Sky News, Sky One etc...), it is important you ring customer services and tell them you are worried about the loss of these channels. Otherwise they may go off the service.

It seems Branson/Virgin is already trying to throw his weight about only 5 minutes after getting into the industry by trying to charge higher fee's to broadcasters. One big problem for him is he is doing it to the wrong company, Sky could end up pulling all their channels as a result, and 50% of the popular channels would go. So let them know you are not happy to lose these channels!

Can't really understand Virgin Media on this one, these channels gain them customers, without the likes of Sky One a lot of people will leave. I think its just Branson thinking he owns the industrry now he has a little crappy cable service that is about 5 yrs out of date and lightyears behind Sky.

Muppets!

Digital Spy Report

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I'm not calling them lol....

Loose the channels loose the customers easy peesy lol..

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i hope they dont ruin it, NTL telewest is the best all-in-one service provider ever,i only wish they done it in my area,it'd save me over 20 sheets a month


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Originally Posted by scoop2004
i hope they dont ruin it, NTL telewest is the best all-in-one service provider ever,i only wish they done it in my area,it'd save me over 20 sheets a month

raftl raftl raftl Tell me some more jokes Scoop, ya gettin good raftl

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Originally Posted by MattyC
Originally Posted by scoop2004
i hope they dont ruin it, NTL telewest is the best all-in-one service provider ever,i only wish they done it in my area,it'd save me over 20 sheets a month

raftl raftl raftl Tell me some more jokes Scoop, ya gettin good raftl


show me a better package?

on demand TV meaning u can watch BBC programs when u like,for no extra charge,fast cheap internet,and free phgonecalls eve and weekend for pittence line rental,i loved it, and,it never ever went wrong on me,unlike my BT home hub,and my SKY box


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Hahaha Scoop, you obviously know pretty much nothing about NTL. Thier network has barely changed since they took over CWC in 2000.

They are still running CR3 (Liberate 1.2), which was developed in 1999, they are still giving out Pace Di2000's and Di4000's (which may I remind you were never fast when they were originally released, and that was in 1998 and 1999 respectively), the network is still on the DOCSIS 1.1 format, with no hope in hell of them upgrading it to DOCSIS 2.0, never mind 3.0 (in fact some parts of the network STILL use the DAVIC format, from the 80's).

Their service hardly works, its full of flaws, the boxes are slow when compared to the Sky EPG software, its also very limited due to lack of investment into the software and box capabilities when compared to Sky.

Wow you can watch a few BBC programs on thier "on demand" service (when it actually works I might remind you), their HDTV offering is the most rediculous lineup ever, just BBC HD, wheras Sky have over 10 mainstream HD channels, they havent even started the nationwide roll out of TV Drive yet, whereas Sky have had Sky+ available since 2001 and SkyHD since 2006...

Lets see if its really cheaper, heres what my mum has:

Sky Digital with 2 channel packs, Sky Broadband 2Mbps/448Kbps and a BT telephone line - £26.00 per month.

Virgin "M" tv pack, 2Mbps/200Kbps internet and a telephone line - £30.00 per month.

Lets see if its cheaper for my current range of services:

Sky Digital with Sky Sports & Movies, Sky+, Sky Broadband 8Mbps/448Kbps and a BT Phoneline (with Sky Talk, so calls are cheaper then NTL in general) - £59.50 per month.

Virgin "XL" tv pack with Sky Sports & Movies, TV Drive (not available in my area yet), 10Mbps/384Kbps and a basic phoneline - £100.00 per month.

So how exactly is that cheaper? And Sky are moving away from CPS to offering direct phoneline soon, the line rental will be even cheaper (£2.00 less then BT).

With regards to on demand, Sky have had their Sky Anytime (formerly Sky By Broadrband) service for over 2 years now and it pisses all over the few select BBC programs you can get on the ondemand service from Virgin. Also, BBC Archive launches this year, very soon in fact, which will make Virgin On Demand almost obsolete. And who needs any on demand service, when one has Sky+ and UK Nova at thier disposal??

BTW, one last little dig, how much "interactive" content do NTL actually have haha.

raftl raftl raftl

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thats a nice lot of spiel u've put there matty, but for the money i spent at the time, u cudnt get better. and thats all i'll say.

as for the NTL boxes being slow,yes they were,but the sky box aint exactly lightning fast


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MattLFC Offline OP
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Originally Posted by scoop2004
as for the NTL boxes being slow,yes they were,but the sky box aint exactly lightning fast
The modern days ones are, my Sky+ (an Amstrad V2) is a bit slow, but its getting on for 4 years old and nowhere near as slow as many peoples NTL boxes around here. But the thing with Sky is they are always releasing newer, faster boxes. My mum has the brand new Sky box and the EPG is almost instant to every key press and menu selection.

My Sky+ is having a couple of slowdowns of late and I will be getting a new one, but I am just waiting for Sky to launch their streamed on-demand service, as I will have a double excuse, because the newest boxes have 160GB hard drives (with 80GB reserved for the streamed on demand service) and mine only has a 40GB hard drive. Unless my box dies first of course lol!

I remember we had NTL and it was on a Di1000. It was fine, although it was slow compared to the Sky boxes at the time. Then the Di2000 was released, which was almost identiacal, and then the Di4000/4001, which when I was a mod on the nthellworld.com forums, gave us endless problem threads due to the amount of bugs, crashes and overheating that the boxes happened to suffer from. Also, with NTL CR software, they have never been fast enough to run at a decent speed.

They do give out the odd Samsung box every now and again which are okish, but thats merely because they ended up with a contractual agreement with Samsung, when Pace declined to give them any more boxes on credit (they were owed £29million at the time by NTL), in a sort of bribery arrangement to get Pace to give them more boxes on credit.

I suppose its a case of Sky having the cash to invest into and develop thier services and NTL Telewest/Virgin Media not.

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well maybe virgin media will make the service better,using faster boxes and all that malarky? cos richard branson is competitive


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Originally Posted by scoop2004
i hope they dont ruin it, NTL telewest is the best all-in-one service provider ever,i only wish they done it in my area,it'd save me over 20 sheets a month


It used to be good scoop,
it has gone down hill on the TV and Broadband service.

TV - On demand
Its good if there is somthing you want to watch,
NO ITV - CH4 - CH5 - Little BBC2 More BBC1
But anything worth watching is 75p > £1.50
It sounds good but its poor, and you never know what there
going to have in the list either.

Broadband
Its a stable as hell.
Dont think about uploads.
Its sooo poor i cant even send a 4mb e-mail anymore.

Internal search
its poo, that's it. Its failing lots at the mo.

It is cheaper allround if you haggel with them.
And in that light is a better deal.

For quality and service
Sky wins Hands down for +£10 per month.

Matty too geeky again straight over joe bloggs head lol

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To be fair, once your out of contract with Sky, you can haggle too, if you phone their customer retention service. The retention deals arnt as good as NTL, but you can usually get things like 3 months free or 6 months half price every 12 months or so.

The problem is, Sky have a service that in general people are extremely please with, because it quite simply works, and makes no exagerated/failed promises. Mass and continous investment in research and development and market research is the reason Sky have far more happy customers and a far better reputation (as well as being actually profitable and not fearing chapter 11 bankruptcy and having takeovers and bonds for equity deals to secure their future every 5 minutes). Its a good job the cableco's in the UK are bizarre in the fact they have registed the businesses in the US, otherwise they wud have died years ago.

Which questions the viability of NTL offering such discounts to pretty much any customer who kicks up a fuss. For years NTL Telewest have kept ahold of customers by putting them on price plans with little or no profit margin at all. This is one of the contributing factors to the demise of cable television services in the UK, along with stupid investments through aquisitions at the height of the telecoms and .com boom and not enough investment or market reasearch in the services and products that matter, which is in turn caused partly by lack of funds and partly by lack of actual market reasearch - a fact proven by the old philosphy for cableco's in the UK was that market research wasnt needed and instead they just got licesnses in rundown urban area's, hoping to appeal to the masses of unemployed and lower class residents who wouldnt get through a credit check with the likes of Sky.

I have a feeling though, that if Virgin Media are to attract customers and start making profit, the huge discounts that NTL Telewest have offered to customers threatening to leave in the past will be very rare, because Branson will realise that this is one of the reasons the company is unprofitable. Remember, other then the flextech channels, Virgin have a burden of not being in control of their own content, whereas Sky own all the big channels etc...

I think a good point was made on digital spy recently, Sky are the company that have kept multi-channel digital television in the UK progressing, if it were left to the cableco's we would be so far behind the rest of the world it would be unbelieveable.

I have always said that cable has the potential to be by far the better service, bring FTTH into the equasion for instance and possibilities for bandwidth are endless. But the cableco's just do not understand the market, they dont realise profit has to be made, and they dont realise that customers expect products to work, and the companies to deliver on their promises in a timely manner.

Maybe Virgin will change things, but you can update/change the cover of a book, the words still remain the same until someone re-writes it (ie. the network, the services etc). The cableco book is about 1000 pages long, the cover has changed to a big Virgin branding atm, but they aere only just getting started on re-writing the book, there is a LONG way to go before they can become a worry to Sky.

And they have even more of a problem in the fact that Sky are starting to diversify now, with the purchase of Easynet allowing them to offer the best and cheapest broadband service by far and on top of this, the pressure being placed on BT to open up the telephone services will enable them to expand even further.

Don't forget also, that Sky's future streamed-on-demand service is only interim, until BT have completed their 21CN in 2009, by which time Sky will be able to launch their own "realtime" On Demand television service, which will run in conjunction with their existing satellite service.

smile

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+++MAJOR UPDATE+++

Virgin Media customers will LOSE the following Sky Channels at the end of February 2007:

- Sky One
- Sky Two
- Sky Three
- Sky Travel
- Sky News
- Sky Sports News

Sky and Virgin Media have been unable to reach an agreement with regards to the carriage of these channels on the Virgin Media cable tv service.

smile

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FFS I like Sky One and Three frown

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Funny how Virgin are arguing that the channels no longer represent value for money and ar not popular anymore, yet they still list Sky One as the very first channel they advertise when trying to get customers to sign up to their television services:

Click me...

think


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Humm i couldnt find a leave me button. lol

There raving about the on demand service in a recent
pro mo letter.

All the "TV Hits" selection is free for 3 months.

That's a massive WOW its full of Eastenders lol

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