Thread: Virgin V+

I'm about to move house as my partner and myself have just bought our first house (wooo!). We both have Sky at the moment but I'm wanting to switch to Virgin for the faster and hopefully more stable broadband but I'm interested how people find Virgins TV service and the V+ box in general?

V+ itself is a good service, we've had it or 6 months and I'm used to it now. At first I forgot we could pause TV, rewind, etc.

The menus are sometimes a bit clunky and it has to think about things, but the ability to record three streams at once is an added bonus.

We have TV, Phone and Internet from them and no problems here!

We have Virgin+, In general it just works - you do get the odd time when the CatchUP TV doesn't work same with the free Music service but it's normally only unavailable for an hour so a week.

The broadband works - I get 18.6mb most day's apart from today i'm getting 16.1mb. DNS can be a little flaky so if you have a spare linux box or windows box run your own dns

Steer well clear of NTL's DNS servers, but otherwise their boradband is good.
Never used V+ but the new standard Samsung set top boxes + new firmware are a good combination and resolve most of the speed and stability issues that the old Samsung and Pace boxes had. I don't usually notice any problems with on demand/catch up TV any more which makes me think it's mostly an STB/firmware issue.

Always had Virgin Media and my only complaint is the V+ service only has BBC HD. Customer support is great if you don't get the Scottish or India call centre.

When my VM contract runs out I am considering Sky just for the HD service but really don't want some shitty ADSL service.

I prefer Virgin TV to Sky.

But one major negative (Sky+ may suffer from this, never used a Sky+ box), is the slowness when changing channels or browsing the channel guide.

Virgin also have BBC iPlayer of course, which is very very good.

Originally Posted by stephenM

BBC iPlayer is not exclusive to Virgin.

But not on Sky ...

Originally Posted by James[UH]

But not on Sky ...

Sky's Anytime service is nice, as is the series link..

They're all much of a muchness tbh..

The only thing I find annoying is I dont get ITV:HD on SkyHD

Also, you can't view show information with Sky unless you're in the Channel Guide proper, with Virgin you can view the information while using the quick guide, without having to drop into the full guide section.

But another plus, the show displays in the top right corner when you're in the full guide ...

I wish they would put the ability to change the channel displayed in mini view from within the guide by pressing red back in rather than having to drop out then load it back up again.
At least it loads quickly on the new boxes/firmware rather than the week or two it used to take on the old ones. Scrolling is almost seamless now too , only a very slight lag (barely noticeable)

I think I'm going to go down the Sky HD route, Virgin doesnt seem to be able to compete unfortunately