Virgin drops 10 UKTV channels: are you affected?

As well as cutting out content for their customers, Virgin are bullying UKTV who, quite reasonably in my view, want a higher payment for their prestige channels in return for making the free ones available. I am not a Virgin customer, so it doesn’t affect me, but I sympathise with those who have committed everything to Virgin and have no alternative technology to catch the channels they like.

I agree with Sophie about Virgin Trains they are not so fast as the French ones and not so spacious but that’s not their fault; most of the the British railways were built to a smaller loading gauge than those on the Continent, but there are equivalent trains on the route from St Pancras and through the Channel Tunnel [I won’t mention HS2].

I’ve been a VM customer for many many years including all their previous incarnations NTL, Nynex etc etc.. They have undoubtedly shot themselves in the foot. I’ve been reading comments on the VM’s own community site and to say there is a groundswell of dissatisfaction would be an understatement of biblical proportions. It seems people have already, or are in the process of changing supplier, mostly to Sky. For my part I will give it a month to see if the enormity of their mistake and the ensuing PR disaster finally dawns on them. Then I will consider my options.

Whilst I realise that their contract is probably watertight in that they reserve the right to add or delete channels at will I find it difficult to understand how they justify the removal of UKTV and its substitution wth totally random second rate channels announcing ’The addition of new and exciting channels’. Some of these are even duplicated and were already included in my TV XL bundled phone and broadband package anyway….’new and exciting’ I don’t think so! Surely this is totally misleading.

In the meantime I shall be contacting VM to demand a reduction in my subscription. Although just how I contact them is another matter since amazingly for a Tech company they do not appear to have an email address for complaints. Their customer complaints telephone line is always engaged and and ‘Live Chat’ is always ‘unavailable at the present time’ surprise surprise!

I am on the Virginmedia Fun package. The loss of Dave, Really, etc is a big inconvenience to me and my wife. We habitually record some of the old programs (Last of the Summer Wine, for example) on the Tivo box for watching at our convenience. Of course, you can’t do this with Freeview without buying another complicated expensive box and it seems that Virgin will delete all my Tivo recordings after 3 months! If we don’t get UKTV back, we will think about cancelling Virginmedia, buying a new recording box and looking at who can give us a cheap home telephone service.
NB One of the replacement channels is 127 Premium Sports HD. The Virginmedia website says that this will be subscription free for 2 months. We don’t watch sports much and I am concerned that I will be charged for this automatically after the 2 months (I have no idea how much!) I have phoned VM to cancel this channel but it is still on my channel list. I have been caught out before by so-called “free” upgrades only to find a later rise in my bill. So it is worth watching out for.

If Virgin is suddenly bereft of some of its key channels it either has to fight back or capitulate. Regular subscribers are going to be ***** off (my asterisks, translate them if you wish) and Virgin will lose some of its revenue. Price reductions probably won’t compensate. People want to watch what they want to watch. It seems as though Virgin can’t fight back in a channel blocking war, or the opposition would have not bothered to blank their output for fear of reprisal. The other option is to pay what is asked of them and take the additional cost on the chin, quietly hiking the subscription fees. Sky does this very effectively claiming that they are doing us a favour and we shouldn’t begrudge them a little extra. It is a cut throat business with many companies vying for our subscriptions and the fickle public shifting loyalties to the next attraction or trend. Is there an argument that the public are entitled to see the television they wish to see, provided they pay for it, thus each supplier should be required to supply every channel as part of their service? If this were the case, then, like the power industry, it would be the service each provided that would gain them the leading edge. Now, each company has their own little cohort of programmes to peddle and they are getting protective about who else can show them. The consumer can only sit and watch -or not as the case may be.