The Poolie Bunker

they've taken Sky Sports News off my NTL base package, it's now called Sky Sports Snooze and I have to upgrade my package to get it.

and sky1 innit?

and innit because of a dispute with ntl/virgin?

I think Sky News has gone too.

Murdoch is a wanker, Murdoch is a wanker...

To be Honest with you, Sky sports news is pants anyway. IT all about the premiership and once you have watch an hour you have seen it for the rest of the day just about.

Let sky pick there ball up and run away hope branson does his own sports channel as he has the money to do it like.

Let them have a war....us the customers will win in the end!!!! :sweet:

the injustice in all of this is that Murdoch and his son will probably both live well into their hundreds.

Branson isn't blameless either though. Why should he only pay a fraction of the price per viewer that Sky subscribers pay?

I've heard that they won't be making any refunds on the money that they now won't be paying Sky. So Virgin will actually be profiting from this.

i wont pay for Sky on principal
i have a free view box and have lost about four channels but so what

Methinks that all of a sudden BitTorrent and the like are going to get a LOT more popular....

I suspect this is as much to do about the mutual dislike that's going on between Branson and Murdoch as the money. Branson wanted to buy ITV, Sky bought a stake as a blocker, Branson goes ape. A few months later and Virgin has no Sky 1 etc. As the Americans would say, Go Figure.

I do think Branson's starting to make some big mistakes the last few years. Virgin Trains has been a PR nightmare, and putting his name to the basket case that was NTL is beginning to look the same.

I prefer him to Murdoch, but then I'd prefer small hairy things from under rocks to Murcoch!

Err, because Sky don't have to pay for the infrastructure that Virgin use for distributing the signal? After all, part of what you pay for with a Dish is the satellite bandwidth, costs of running Sky's billing, support for Digiboxes etc. All Sky have to provide to NTL is the correct signal which isn't going to cost any more if it's for 1 million than 10,000. NTL/Virgin then have all the technical hassle of getting it out to their customers... so even at a relatively lower income they could well be making more per customer on NTL than for the same customer with a Minidish - they're much cheaper to support from Sky's point of view.

However as Sky is now offering far more services (Broadband, I think they're doing phone as well now, pay per view, High Definition, Sky+) they think they can get more money per user if they're on Sky as they'll probably take other services or channel packages. I know that when we were on Cable, there were a lot of channels that came even with relatively basic packages (Sci Fi, MTV, VH1 spring to mind) that aren't on the relatively basic package we now get from Sky.... to get them we'd have to add another "mix" to our current one. - so who gets that money then?

I actually am beginning to think timing and content are at the heart of this. As has been pointed out, a lot of series are currently on Sky 1 and part way through - so people will complain bitterly if it goes off and Virgin get a lot of the flack. If it was in, say, June, a lot of series had finished, and then "Virgin Prime" appears and takes a lot of the top programmes currently on Sky, who will lose market share? Similarly, Virgin seems very short on self-produced content or channels (from memory at least) beyond the odd local channel - presumably one of the big reasons Branson wanted ITV. If you're going to battle over content, Sky is the clear winner now - but if you could add ITV to Virgin and then win some of the top shows from the US, it would be a lot tighter battle. I wonder if Sky is attacking now, before Branson can get the content in?

I want a word with them about the dodgy box they've given me so I've just sent sky an email cancelling the subscription. There's no way I'm going to give them 15p a minute to be on hold for days on end. See how long it takes them to respond.