Apologies for blatent misuse of an RL forum but is there anyone on here who has switched to SKY from Virgin Media (or vice versa) and has an opinion about which is best?

We currently have SKY TV but Virgin Media phone and internet. I'm hoping to switch all three to one company to save some money, but have got a better offer from Virgin than SKY.

However that means going from SKY TV to Virgin Media TV and I've only ever had SKY before so don't know how Virgin measures up? I quite like Sky Plus and the 'Red Button' features on SKY (especially on live football) but don't know whether Virgin have anything similar and, if so, what it's like.

Anyone got any advice??? Pleeeeease??????

We've just switched from Virgin to Sky.

You don't get any of the red button features on Virgin. The main reason we switched was to watch the NRL. That channel's gone PPV now though.

Strangely enough I was talking about this with the missus the other day and I was saying it would take something pretty exceptional to make me switch from Sky to Virgin. Having been with VM in the NTL days I found the customer service shoddy in the extreme & billing to be questionable. Sky have really upped their game in recent years in this area & it's actually genuinely a pleasure to deal with the call centres IMO. Cable broadband will always be vastly superior to ADSL but in every other area Sky wins hands down for me.

have virgin plus/hd also has the red button option, have not had any problems with them, must add we have the full package phone /telly/broadband.

chipped virgin box all the way!!!!free everything.....and all adult !!!

As the Birchwood monarch says, Virgin Media does not yet have red button functionality on Sky Sports. For BBC it does, but not much else. As part of a deal VM did to sell some channels to Sky, the addition of this service was muted but nothing has materialised yet.

The V+ boxes are the equivalent of Sky Plus. In fact, V+ has double the recording capacity and an extra tuner, which means you can watch one channel and record two others at the same time. The V+ boxes also have HD as standard with no extra fee; but, this doesn't include the Sky brands (Sports, Movies etc). For those, it's an extra £7/£8 a month on top.

The customer service has improved immeasurably since the dark days of NTL and as Yorkie says, cable broadband will always kick ASDL broadband into touch. The other bonus V+ boxes have over Sky is access to free on demand services such as BBC iPlayer.

However, unless you're saving a reasonable wedge (£20+ a month) I'd think long and hard about switching. Get hold of BBM, she made the switch a while back.

That won't last long fella, they've cottoned on.

Didn't think Virgin could do anything, they block the signal once in a while, but don't the chipped boxes find the new signal themselves?

I switched from Virgin to sky a while back because the customer service was so shoddy!!

the box kept breaking, and I know they don't charge to come out but did take up to 2 weeks to come out.

Agree with the virgin billing as well! Never right, I friend of mine in work switched over and was supposed to have a fix price, it took 6 months to sort!!

Also I found out from a sky phone attendent that you can have 2 special offers on your account at one time. They don't advertise this but if you ask what special offer can I have for my account they will give you 2!

At the mo I have 20 -30% of final bill plus half price line rental!

starview1 box oh yeah

won't matter when they become door stops. vm are rolling out nagra3 encryption with all subs recieving new cards. if you google about there are plenty of peeps who's chips have already gone to stb heaven.

Yep, I got my new cards about a month ago.

Another thing about Virgin Media. They've done a deal to bring Tivo back to the U.K. Tivo enabled STBs may be available from early next year with recording capacities of up to 1TB.

opened my mouth to quick, I had my box for a long time and it just went down

, looks like i'll have to get a real one

looks like it will be sooner
[urlhttp://www.tivocentral.co.uk/tivo-powers-virgin-tv.htm[/url