Virgin Media

I may be wrong, but it wouldn't surprise me if the names were simply changed by an engineer who thought it'd be funny, rather than it being sanctioned from the top.

Quite possibly, but then again if you look at some of the humour other Virgin companies have provided in the past I wouldn't be surprised if it was straight from Branson himself.

The fact it's been changed back so quickly makes me think it wasn't really supposed to have been there... but who knows, you may be right.

Oh I didn't realise it had been changed back, in which case I think you're right - a rogue engineer.

The only channel I'm sad to lose has to be sky sports news , The rest can stay away for all i care

Well Virgin Media customers aren't really missing out on much from Sky News, considering their graphics relaunch and some of the content. Glad to see Virgin have called the channel 'Old Sky Snooze'. Good on Virgin for sticking with their guns against Sky.

Good on Virgin for doing this - Sky's name is really getting dragged through the media as the bad guy.

I find people on here who say "Just get Sky...it's better anyway" are missing the point.

I live in a flat and Sky is not an option. For a pretty decent rate a month I get TV and broadband internet. I don't need a phone line (Like I would if I wanted to hook up to Sky for "free" ) and of course I couldn't actually install the satellite dish even if I wanted to.

Although I'm sorry to see Sky One go - purely for the fact that I'd flick over and see something very occassionally that I would want to watch - there's no great loss with the other channels.

I think this has shown one thing we've known for many years that Sky simply don't have content worth paying over the odds for. OK, they've got movies and sports - but they pretty much got those by default by being the first in the UK market to afford them. Other than that, I doubt we're missing much.

A friend of mine lives in a flat in a listed building and can't have Sky (or cable either) so relies on Freeview to give him Sky Three and SSN. He's annoyed that he's got to buy a new box in summer to keep watching them (and pay a subscription).

We are going to see this whole argument dragging Sky through the mud again in Summer if/when they get the go-ahead from Ofcom to change their Freeview channels.

There's a side issue here: let's say I own a TV channel. For that channel to be on Sky, I have to pay Sky for the privilege. For that channel to be on cable, the cable company have to pay me for the privilege.

I wonder whether this is Branson wanting to turn that model around so that channels pay a fee to be carried on virgin media rather than the other way round.

It will be interesting to see what happens when Sky Movies contract needs renewing.

With 500+ films in the On Demand bank they COULD decide to dump the movie channels and let movies subscribers have full access to the On Demand movies section for the same cost.

No idea how likely, or even possible that would be, but it guess it could happen.

Not quite the case - general speaking Sky pay you if your part of their subscription package - though I think with FTA you pay them officially for the place on the EPG.

I know with all the ITV fiasco basically ITV paid Sky to broadcast ITV1 and Sky paid ITV to broadcast ITV2,3,4 etc.


Sky basically do what they want though. When E4 went free to air on Freeview Sky stopped paying C4 any subscription fees - yet E4 remained encrypted on Sky and is still part of the Sky package. Similarly with More4 everyone thought it be FTA on Sky, including C4 - but for some reason Sky got away with keeping it encrypted against the broadcasters wishes - even though I think it's broadcast from C4's own transponder space. Don't know what the deal with Film4 is!

No its still there for me.

http://www.gorillaenterprises.co.uk/upload/uploadFiles/snooze.jpg