[sammyjayuk]

Actually, I chose to allow VM to force me not to be able to (reasonably) choose Sky, for 12 months.

That was last October, so I still have 8 months of the contract to go. Forgive me but, when we hear about concrete plans to put HD channels on Freeview, I expect to hear statements from VM (a company which, contractually, will have had over £700 of my money by this October) with a little more rigidity than a soggy Kit Kat - "coming soon" or "in due course," which seem to be all we hear these days, are completely unacceptable.

What's worse was the lie last December about having HD channels, plural (or perhaps he "misspoke"), and what is increasingly looking like the lie of more HD channels in the next 3 months (or perhaps he, umm... is..... did.... meant... has.. got...... urrr... aha! Maybe he has this tragic degenerative brain disease, the only current symptom of which is to confuse months with years. Eventually however, everything will be 12 times more or less to him, or take him 12 times longer. SIXTY - that's FIVE to you and me - might make a 14-hourly series about it. Watching him cook will be mildly entertaining, until 12 fire engines arrive and order the cameras to be shut off - which is just as well because they'll be about to run out of tape. In the end it gets recursive, and I'm afraid my calculator skills aren't up to that...)

Right, at some point I had a, well, a point. Oh yeah.

Think about how much you're paying/have paid/have to pay/will pay VM, especially if you're still within contract. If, like me, you value many parts of the service but think being fobbed off and potentially lied to by the most important people in the company (or at least the most highly paid) is unacceptable, please consider signing the petition.

Oh and KnightRider, while I mostly agree with you on basic principles (taking into account what I said in the first line of this post), in a rather short amount of time HD channels are going to become as much a basic requirement of a digital TV service as an EPG is now. Both Sky and Freeview will have as many as is (are?) possible - in Sky's case as many HD channels as can possibly exist, in Freeview's case as many as can be carried while the government still insist on using the entire "digital dividend" as a cash cow (and boy, are they going to need to!). Freesat is a little more complicated, due to it being so young and the need for channels to be FTA (and I wonder how much a Freesat EPG slot costs...), but I'm sure we'll see more HD channels once the service becomes more established.

I suppose that VM (to continue with my seemingly relentless tirade of negative adjectives aimed towards them) are therefore also being irresponsible with respect to their shareholders, to allow themselves to fall so far behind.

Sam