After 3 years of the landlord paying £90/month for our NTL he's now cancelled his contract so I've had to get my own. Just calculated that we've had just over £3200 worth of free TV, phone and broadband out of him!
We decided to stick with Virgin as it's so much easier to just have the one bill and we've been very happy with the service. The missus has always wanted a PVR and having just got a new LCD TV I fancied some HD content, so we decided to go for the £35/month V+ package.
We had to pay a £45 installation fee (normally £150 but it's half price at the mo, and then they give you another £30 off for ordering online) and I'm glad it was so cheap because it only took the engineer 20 minutes as we already had all the cabling in place.
First impressions of the V+ box is that it's big and ugly! It could certainly look a bit sleeker. It feels quite cheap on the outside and the display on the front looks like a 80's calculator. The remote is much better though with a rubberised backing and large well-spaced buttons. There's a few button's which could be in better locations but that's a moot point for me though as I'll be using a Logitech Harmony remote anyway.
The V+ box is a very good SD upscaler. SD TV with our old STB (silver Samsung one) looked pap on my LG 37" LCD. The V+ box takes the badly compressed signals which seem to be becoming more common nowadays and does a good job of turning them into something of a much better quality. The higher bitrate channels such as BBC, ITV and C4 look almost as good as HD which I was very impressed with. HD-wise there is only BBC HD at the moment, but the engineer advised that C4 HD and Sky Sports/Movies HD will be online by the end of the month. There's quite a bit of on-demand HD content available which all looks very nice on a big telly.
The software on the box is slow unfortunately, but anyone who's used NTL/Virgin before should be used to this. Navigating through the EPG can be a slow process sometimes. The V+ PVR features are very easy to use though..even my gf has picked them up already. There's a few things I'd like it to be able to do which it can't at the moment (such as recording a time-delayed program, or recording the whole of a program start to finish after the start of the program, which Sky+ can do apparently).
Overall I'm one happy customer and thought I'd share the fact! If there's anything you'd like me to test out on the V+ box then just give me a shout.
Andy
We decided to stick with Virgin as it's so much easier to just have the one bill and we've been very happy with the service. The missus has always wanted a PVR and having just got a new LCD TV I fancied some HD content, so we decided to go for the £35/month V+ package.
We had to pay a £45 installation fee (normally £150 but it's half price at the mo, and then they give you another £30 off for ordering online) and I'm glad it was so cheap because it only took the engineer 20 minutes as we already had all the cabling in place.
First impressions of the V+ box is that it's big and ugly! It could certainly look a bit sleeker. It feels quite cheap on the outside and the display on the front looks like a 80's calculator. The remote is much better though with a rubberised backing and large well-spaced buttons. There's a few button's which could be in better locations but that's a moot point for me though as I'll be using a Logitech Harmony remote anyway.
The V+ box is a very good SD upscaler. SD TV with our old STB (silver Samsung one) looked pap on my LG 37" LCD. The V+ box takes the badly compressed signals which seem to be becoming more common nowadays and does a good job of turning them into something of a much better quality. The higher bitrate channels such as BBC, ITV and C4 look almost as good as HD which I was very impressed with. HD-wise there is only BBC HD at the moment, but the engineer advised that C4 HD and Sky Sports/Movies HD will be online by the end of the month. There's quite a bit of on-demand HD content available which all looks very nice on a big telly.
The software on the box is slow unfortunately, but anyone who's used NTL/Virgin before should be used to this. Navigating through the EPG can be a slow process sometimes. The V+ PVR features are very easy to use though..even my gf has picked them up already. There's a few things I'd like it to be able to do which it can't at the moment (such as recording a time-delayed program, or recording the whole of a program start to finish after the start of the program, which Sky+ can do apparently).
Overall I'm one happy customer and thought I'd share the fact! If there's anything you'd like me to test out on the V+ box then just give me a shout.
Andy
