[Horace]

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 The move to a standard VBox was a good one, but that model is out of date by at least a couple of years, and they probably need something that could either handle MPEG4 + much a beefier encryption "out of the box" should VM migrate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.

Sky effectively own their own encryption system (NDS). VM would have to pay Kudelski, not only for a card-swap out but box updates too which is very expensive by all accounts.