The Box Plus Network to be removed from Virgin Media

That's been annoying me since they day they got rid of it, I keep hoping they bring it back. Though Vintage TV seem to (in my opinion) be doing a better job than the the MTV channels or Magic these days anyway. Though I've not really watched Magic or VH1 much since Vintage launched on Virgin, they're both pretty dire any more, definately not the channels they were in the 90s (in VH1's case) or 00s.

MTV Classic is too 90s and 00s skewed for my liking, Vintage TV and NOW Music TV are the best of a bad bunch of music channels IMHO.

One thing I really appreciate about Vintage TV is they pillarbox most 4:3 content (even leaving in the faux-letterbox bars on many videos rather than zooming them out, which in my opinion is how it should be done, as it's an intentional effect) whereas the others crop to various degrees.

One issue with Vintage though is they do filmise a fair bit of content- not that you'd notice on stuff on film but on stuff from the 70s and 80s either shot on video or using video effects you notice, though they seem to leave a lot more stuff 50i more recently.

If you press red on 4Music to get the streams of the other channels on Freeview, the stream for Magic is set to constant 4:3.

Also, I agree with Vintage TV, they leave the videos alone. I hate seeing a video on any of the MTV channels and it is cropped to 16:9 and so much is cut off. The Box network seem to crop to 14:9 mostly but it's still annoying. Leave them as 4:3 or if the black bars really annoy the channel owners, use the blurry effect down the sides instead. Looks much better than zooming in on everything.

The shortest ever TV channel carriage dispute... at less than 5 hours? Very odd.

Oh yes, another thing I can say I like about Vintage is the way they make their own videos from stock footage for a lot of older songs that don't have videos, as well as digging up performance footage of some stuff, which means they play a lot of stuff you'll never see on the other channels due to lack of a video.

VH1 (but mostly VH1 Classic) used to air performances of older songs without videos, until they succumbed to becoming MTV Classic. Sometimes they were often taken from performances of TOTP or whatever (much like when Slade gets wheeled out at Christmas).

I wish Vintage's quality was better on Freesat, though. Mostly for their original content, of course. (No idea how the quality is on other platforms).

I can remember the days when MTV and VH1 used to make similar, decent original programming, and a fair amount of it- those days are long gone. The most you get these days if you're lucky is a handful of pre-recorded links cheaply done on the same studio set.

It looks as if a deal was met, all channels still remain on Virgin Media.

Some particularly old performances were also sourced from a German music programme, The Beat Club . They still sometimes appear on the European feed of VH1 Classic.