Re: Sky vs Virgin - Futureproofing..
 

The weather issue highlights those who (for whatever reason) already have poor quality signal issues.

Re: Sky vs Virgin - Futureproofing..
 

Exactly , usually caused by poorly aligned satellite dishes.

Re: Sky vs Virgin - Futureproofing..
 

Not had any weather related problems since getting sky installed last year.

I think the OP has a different topic title than the question asked. I don't see how installation method affects the future proofing of a service. Sky dishes can be put anywhere with a phone line, which is almost every house in the country, wheras virgin have to dig up streets to add new households.

As said before weather is not an issue.

How many streams a service has now does no mean anything for the future. Methods of using home networking can resolve some issues and upgrading stbs canadd more tuners. But who really needs to recoding 5 channels while watching another.


More Importantly for the future of both services is having tv thst customers will pay for. Sky have more money to inest in tv while vm is loosing out with channels lately. Unless something changes soon, I think vm could lose a fair few tv customers who take their other services awway too.

Re: Sky vs Virgin - Futureproofing..
 

It's swings and roundabouts.. If you have a bad sky install, then weather can affect your signal massively on sky (I've seen several examples of this). But, on the flip side, if you have a bad cable install, you still have problems, just not necessarily to do with the weather.

Re: Sky vs Virgin - Futureproofing..
 

If you have a good cable install you can still have problems, ondemand not available , power levels deciding to go tuts up, a VM tech deciding to stick you on a crap tap at the cab to give a new customer good service....

Re: Sky vs Virgin - Futureproofing..
 

Is it something they could phase in by swapping boxes, or are they just stuck with it for the foreseeable future because there'd be too many?

Re: Sky vs Virgin - Futureproofing..
 

It could be done, but there isn't any pressing reason to do so. VM has more than enough bandwidth free for all current plans. Besides, the saving from changing to MPEG-4 is nothing like as much as some people would have you believe. There are better things for VM to spend money on.

Re: Sky vs Virgin - Futureproofing..
 

VM have plenty of room for channels. Moving to MPEG4 would be costly (replacing boxes, and I'm pretty sure feeds are delivered to VM as MPEG2, so there'd need to be encoding kit), and would only give an advantage in terms of being able to record more onto the TIVO, which is easily solved by offering bigger hard drives to those who want them, for a price.

Edit: it's also not quite the case that a Sky box can only record one thing per cable. Each cable connects to an LNB. Each LNB can only tune to horizontal or vertical, and each of those is split into high and low frequencies. So if you had a box with a dozen tuners, it'd only need 4 cables. The LNBs used for distributing Sky signals throughout a building/block of flats are usually Quattro LNBs, so you can run 4 cables to distribution equipment in the attic, and then run more or less as many cables to as many boxes as you like.

A quattro LNB differs from a Quad LNB in that it has four LNBs, each for one of the 4 tuning states. H/High, H/Low, V/High and V/Low. They NEED distribution kit like multiswitches.

A Quad LNB has 4 LNBs each capable of switching to any of the four states. Quad LNBs are what are installed in single-property residential installs.

Edit 2: And it's technically possible for a satellite tuner to record multiple channels per tuner, if they're all on the same mux.

Re: Sky vs Virgin - Futureproofing..
 

Yes, but not that much.

It's time you looked again ;)

Re: Sky vs Virgin - Futureproofing..
 

Confirmed as 100hrs HD here or 500hrs SD.

http://my.virginmedia.com/discover/t.../tivo-box.html

Re: Sky vs Virgin - Futureproofing..
 

If you have a good Sky install, you can still have problems... The STB or LNB(s) can fail out of warranty. Someone can put a building between your dish and the satellite, or they can let nearby trees grow out of control (this last one actually rendered my friends otherwise good Sky install totally useless). As I said, swings and roundabouts.

That's without the problems that can be introduced by broadband.

Re: Sky vs Virgin - Futureproofing..
 

Personally I believe that breakthroughs in the near future will lead to all internet and tv being delivered via the air eventually. Vast IP networks via radiowave or similar that are perfectly reliable in all conditions with mega amounts of bandwidth available. Its more a case of when than if!

Re: Sky vs Virgin - Futureproofing..
 

I have a good cable install and have never experienced any of these problems.

Didn't you earlier in a post in this very thread kind of say it was wrong to assume everyone with a dish would experience problems in bad weather? So now it's ok to assume everyone on cable will be afflicted by these issues? :rolleyes:

Re: Sky vs Virgin - Futureproofing..
 

I would bet money that a good percentage more Virgin customers have had problems with their tv than sky customers ;)

Re: Sky vs Virgin - Futureproofing..
 

That's probably right if you base that percentage on only the posts within this site. I'm sure you're already aware most members who post here do so because they have cable. How about if I make a bet to see if there are more dissatisfied customers on the Sky User site than there are cable? ;-)