Hello
 

New contributor here.

Many issues with VM, some good and some bad, but what I want to say is, How can VM & Sky advertise "loads of channels" when a great deal of them are the same channel in HD or +1 it is an outrage, and a big con. if you took the HD & +1 away, i'm sure this would remove about 40% of the number of channels advertised.

Anyway rant over, When are we getting the Red button service on Sky Sports? do we really expect it sometime in April? I won't hold my breath.

And why is the Interactive channel on VM so crap?

I remember in the Cable North West Days before Telewest, when they were telling us what magnificent services we could get interactive, Shopping, Games, order pizza,

It has just turned out to be a great big white elephant. and why on earth has there been a "text button" on the remotes forever?

Pathetic service.

Re: Hello
 

Evening, and welcome to CF!

'Interactive' has been discussed a fair bit recently. I think the next generation of TV 'apps' may be better than the woeful underpowered attempts we had before. I mean seriously, across all three platforms they're all just garbage.

Text button is a bit of an anomaly - I think the only time I ever pressed it was to confirm my HD settings. But digital text never got the same love teletext did, and I think for the same reason the early 'interactive' stuff bombed - we've all got the ruddy internet these days, so why not use that?

And Cable North West - where are you from? That was the original franchise in my old home town of Ashton-in-Makerfield!

Re: Hello
 

Prescot in Merseyside mate.

Yeah Cable North West, seems so long ago now, eh?

Re: Hello
 

They are still channels, even if they show repeats (the +1 channels) or the same thing at a different resolution (HD).

Anyway, the chances are, even on VM, you can have up to 100 channels even leaving out the +1 and HD channels).

Dunno.

I can't talk about Cable North West, but a friend of mine developed some interactive content for a project. She wrote to Sky and NTL. Sky basically said f off unless you want to pay. NTL gave her the development software she needed, access to a special server and all the help she needed.

The application she developed was amazing, and far better than anything used at the time on the red button.

The problem that most TV companies found is that the sites for interactive TV cost a lot to develop, and offered little or no extra income. This is exactly the reason Channel 4 stopped offering services.

I suspect this lead to fewer people bothering with the red button (less on it), so eventually VM found that their own interactive services were not generating enough income to make it worth their while keeping them.

Sky refusing to allow access to their own interactive services for so long certainly did not help matters.