Quote:
Originally Posted by Turkey Machine
If Sky can send out new smart cards to all their subscribers, which far outnumber Virgin Media's (Sky have 8 millionish), and they can also do a complete upgrade of their boxes (late 90s, the move to digital), surely Virgin can do the same thing, right? I mean, it's only 3, 4 million TV subscribers? (total guestimate) The boxes need to be standardised, as there are too many box versions knocking about from the C+W, Telewest and ntl days. The move to a standard VBox was a good one, but that model is out of date by at least a couple of years, and they probably need something that could either handle MPEG4 + much a beefier encryption "out of the box" should VM migrate the network from MPEG-2 to MPEG4 AVC, or with a future firmware upgrade will be able to handle it. Either way, they need to sort their encryption problems out, and ease their capacity issues.
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One MAJOR difference between Sky and Virgin. Sky do not own (and therefore would not have had to pay to replace) their boxes. You say that VM only have 3-4 million customers. They do. However, each box would cost at least £20-£30 (I don't know the actual cost, so I am speculating conseveratively) to replace, so the hardware would cost at least £60 million. That is without factoring engineering or delivery costs, which could easily push the cost over £100 million.
Simply put, VM cannot afford to spend that much.
The encryption, well, IIRC, Sky have an advantage there too. They bought the company who provided theirs.