Virgin, please read the following and adapt your advertising appropriately:

• You don’t own the box: Virgin don’t sell you a box, they let you rent it. Which means free repairs, free replacements and no extra £10-15 a month for a support plan just to get someone out to your house when your Sky box is dead. Virgin also offer remote support on the box where by they can fix some problems over the phone. Sky doesn’t offer this, unless you’re paying extra. Another benefit to this for Virgin’s customers is that your box also gets upgraded for free too.
• Record two, watch one: With Virgin this literally means watch one program whilst recording two others. With Sky, this means record two programs and one watch of them. This is annoying as you more often than not end up watching parts of one of the programs you’ve got set to record. Another annoyance attached to this is that Sky disables all other features when two programs are recording, no information, no guide, nothing unless you cancel a recording.
• Information button? Well… not really. With Virgin, you browse to a program or channel and press the information button and it gives you information on the program you currently have selected. With Sky, it simply returns information on the program you’re currently watching. That is, unless you’re looking through the guide.
• Elevator music: Sky’s guide is boring. You press it and it removes all trace of the program you’re watching. You browse through the channels and everything else whilst listening to elevator music and are stuck staring at text. Virgin on the other hand: you have a small picture of what you were watching and can continue to hear the channel as well as watching it whilst browsing the guide.
• Television, that isn’t on: anywhere. Sky has ‘catch up TV’ where by you have a selection of 15-20 great programs over the past week to watch through. The problem is, you require a subscription to the channels to watch them. With Virgin there’s this and a massive back catalogue including the BBC iPlayer, Channel 4’s 4-on-Demand and hundreds of other series for you to watch through. A massive, massive plus on Virgin’s side.

Feel free to share your annoyances with Sky or Virgin in the comments below. I’d love to hear your opinions.

Tags: little things, sky, virgin

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This is the results so far of a poll on a story about Virgin threatening to sue Sky because they are being ridiculous over the payment discussion involving Sky One, Sky Two, Sky Sports News, Sky News and Sky travel.

Now is it just me, or would that number be considerably lower if us UK LOST, 24 and Battlestar Galactica fans could just buy the shows on iTunes in the first place? And yet today iTunes receives yet another update that only particularly benefits American users.

That said – why in the UK are we being sold Apple TV? Unless we are running a music shop that shows music videos all day long, or we have managed to find 100 video podcasts to watch of quality amongst the 5-10 or so that exist on the internet… there’s really no point in the device over here.

Sorry for the rant, but this rubbish with Sky and Virgin would never have happened if the shows weren’t so centralised onto one network in the first place. In America they have the ability to view online, iTunes, TV and TV recording to watch it from. Over here? Just Sky One, oh – and the ability to watch online, if your a Sky customer.

Note: I’ll be returning the blog back to it’s interesting state once my incredibly busy rush that has come on lately has calmed down – possibly when the new JHuskisson.com launches.

Tags: apple, discussion, sky, virgin

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Anyhow, twelve days ago NTL:Telewest rebranded as Virgin Media and in those twelve days a lot has happened:

• The immediate availabilty of their new V+ box, which betters Sky’s current Sky+ digital box in several ways (including the ability to record two shows, and then watch a third at the same time)
• Uma Thurman everywhere (Hello?)
• Virgin on Demand content deal with Disney
• Virgin on Demand content deal with Buena Vista
• Virgin on Demand content deal with HBO
• Launched a VIP pack which, for many people is giving them more for less.
• Changes to a lot of the billing structure with phone bills and television packages – in most cases for the best (including a Sky Sports pack which undercuts Sky)
• Launched of Virgin Central, a television channel specifically for telelvision on demand (all of which is free, so far)
• Announced investment of £5 million on customer services (something NTL cut down to a bare minimum…)
• They have Sky so shook up over a renewal of their deal for certain channels including sky one – they are actually launching ads telling Virgin customers to ring up their customer service rep to help them persuade Virgin to renew
• Advertising absolutely everywhere, even reportedly in non-cable areas where they can’t even get Virgin Media
• They’ve started sending out text messages to let customers know when technicians are due out at their houses and when they are coming. A nice additional touch.

Do I need more of a reason to love Virgin? I have to say, it’s the complete opposite of my feelings for NTL, but now Virgin are at the helms.. it’s clearly a different company.

Tags: virgin

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Changes include a new ‘download movies/tv shows’ service for broadband users (something I’ll certainly be looking into), ‘no limits’ broadband (something previously promised by NTL), a much much simpler website and from the looks of it – real HDTV support. I’ve also noticed their policy fully supports companies making lawsuits against their customers such as ‘illegal’ downloading and that Virgin will support them in any way they can (something that NTL stopped a while ago, since the time of ‘the letter’ coming in the mail).

Beforehand the website had become so cluttered for use that made no sense that it not only was it annoying to use but you had to click 3-4 times to get to a page that you wanted – and that’s if you where clicking in the right places.

Here’s five things ‘Virgin Media’ needs to do to revive NTL out the dark ages:
- Make the broadband stable. It needs to stay up 24/7 and not have constant ‘down time’ for ‘maintenance’ at eight hours a time. Support your users and give us real ‘uncapped’ downloading – no hidden messages when the user downloads too much one month.

- Revive the promises of NTL from their Digital department. We hear about ‘new 200gb boxes that let you record and all this jazz’ every time someone comes out to replace one of our NTL digital boxes (which is once a year, at least). I want to see some of this in action.. I want to see these boxes and have the company show me that something is happening rather than just talking about it. Up until now those ‘jazz boxes’ have been in testing for two years.

- Hire some decent programmers for the digital service – or just use Telewest. Telewest merged with NTL a while back and we’ve not seen a single benefit from it. However, Telewest offers instant channel browsing, a real guide system, smaller boxes, better remotes, instant on-demand, teletext… shall I keep going? The point is, Telewest have done something great with their software on their boxes, NTL haven’t – why isn’t this something all customers are experiencing?

- Stop closing NTL customer support buildings. My mum used to work at one and this building has shut down 10 or so departments out of 12 or so since she left. Not a direct reflection of her leaving but merely a showing of how little NTL has valued customer support that comes from this country. We are now shipped to India where people don’t know what ‘E4′ and ‘The family movie package’ actually is – which makes our calls three times longer and ten times more frustrating.

- Bring the Virgin brand in with force. Give us a sleek red box with the Virgin brand that becomes the purple cow of boxes underneath the television, give us something to say ‘Virgin have come into the digital market’ and don’t stand still with the innovation and improvements for four years like NTL have done with their ‘Jazz boxes’

- Number six (isn’t there always one extra?) – improve the damn interactive service. Why can’t NTL users press Red when it says so? Sky customers can.. I can only presume this is because it’s a bad platform behind it. We can on E4.. and recently BBC, but not really anywhere else.

Tags: discussion, ideas, virgin

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