[jonmac]

To be honest, after receiving the Virgin Media promotional literature (promising the earth) through the post, including an upbeat letter from Richard Branson, I was looking forward to the new branding of my NTLTV account and I felt that we were going places now that Virgin Media was in control. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Since Virgin Media took over there has been a serious downgrading of the service hitherto received from NTL. I just wish I could turn the clock back.

A few of the more obvious defects of the new service are:

1. It is no longer possible to set programme reminders for the day or the evening using the TV Guide, as this now only displays the current programme and the next one. This is next to useless. For a long time I have been able to check through the day’s programmes, whenever it was convenient to me, and mark those I wanted to watch or record for the whole day or whole evening. Now that Virgin Media has assumed control this has been taken away. This means I now have to continually go back to the menu listings after every programme I watch to set reminders. Yesterday, for example, the programme I wanted to set a reminder for was only 6 minutes away but I was still unable to set a reminder as the ‘statutoryâ €™ two programmes were already on display. My programme was due to start before it made it to the menu display. This is a nuisance and I have already missed recording some of my favourite programmes because of it.

2. The diary of programme reminders is buried deep in the system and it now takes 17 clicks to get to it, as opposed to 1 or 2 clicks under the old NTL system. I am no longer able to call it up to see at a glance the programmes I have set reminders for. Why can’t a button for the programme reminders be placed on the mini view, as before?

3. It is no longer possible to set reminders for programmes that clash. This might not seem to make sense but now that this option has been removed I can no longer see a list all the programmes I may want to watch or record at a single glance. When I was able to do this I could easily decide which programmes to record, which to watch and which to let go. With so many programmes and a multiplicity of channels to chose from it is only realistic to do this from a single list.


4. The ‘Favouritesà¢ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ã‚¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ menu has also been rendered next to useless. This too only shows the current and the next programme, as does the mini view screen. Before both of them showed all the listings for the day and this was a convenient, easy to get at display.

5. The new oppressive black background of the mini view menu (replacing a semitransparent blue menu) is far too obtrusive and obscures that bottom half of the screen. It’s true that this can be swapped for a white background but this is also obtrusive and nowhere near as good as the one it has replaced.

6. The ability to reorder the channel listings to suit my own needs has similarly gone. I now find that I have to accept the default order, even though it does not suit my needs. I really can't see why we had to lose this valuable facility. It meant that I could relegate the dozens of channels I never watch to the bottom of the list.


Lastly, I would like to have sent my complaint to NTL (Virgin Media) via email but this is not possible for complaints about TV. There is no email address to write to. I tried to make my complaint over the phone but the person I spoke to wasn’t even aware that the changeover to Virgin Media had already been made. Not surprisingly, this proved to be a useless conversation but it does show that staff are not as up to date on the changes as Virgin Media has suggested.



jonmac