[steveh]

I've had cable TV for twenty years now, but I'm seriously considering whether it's time I gave it up, especially with the price rise. So this is my thinking (well, rant really) on the problems the Virgin Media TV service has and what would stop me dumping it.


The package

The XL package just isn't working for me anymore. There are probably now only five premium channels that I regularly watch and all of those are in the £6.99 Now TV entertainment pack. I've always defended bundling in the past as the economics used to work out better for everyone than a la carte pricing. However, Virgin's move to attract sports fans by pushing premium sport into XL makes it a poor deal for people like me who have no interest in sport. HD is also nothing special these days, but XL is still charging extra for it.

There probably are some interesting things I miss on channels other than my usuals, but discoverability scales badly as the number of channels increases and other services make it easier for me to find individual programmes that I might want to watch. Virgin needs a competitive product against Now TV for entertainment channels, even if it's one they only offer to people who want to leave. A tenner a month for 12 popular premium HD entertainment channels plus the usual free-to-air ones could work.


TiVo

I have to be honest that after hearing a lot about its power I was really disappointed when I got the TiVo. The interface is just one big trainwreck, littered with examples of poor user interface practice and poor graphic design. Buttons do different things in different places, there are long menu paths that could be simplified and if you make a mistake it takes a whole load of button presses to fix. Fundamentally the TiVo is a nineties PVR that's been bodged for cable TV with apps and on-demand. It's a classic example of why you should never let hardware engineers get involved in user interfaces. On top of that the hardware is woefully underpowered for what the software requires, leading to the long blank screens, nasty video tearing and audio cutouts.

Probably I would watch more channels if the UI was better and using it to find programmes of interest wasn't so stupidly slow. Suggestions are rarely useful and the bar at the top of the screen is just rubbish. Even as a PVR I find I'm recording less and less. Shows are increasingly likely to go to Netflix or Amazon rather than satellite / cable and as more are available on-demand there are fewer times I find I need to record anything. For Freeview channels my TV has a drive attached for recording and a dynamic EPG that unlike the TiVo gets the recording times right. Virgin need to either get TiVo to do a radical overhaul to bring the interface up to the standards of the competition or they need to dump it for something better.

I've written before on all the issues with the TV Anywhere app and most of those criticisms still stand.


On-demand

When it first started, Virgin's on-demand was ahead of the pack but it hasn't kept up with the competition. Recent films on Virgin are usually more expensive than elsewhere, you can't buy them outright for a few quid more and you can't stream them on all the other devices that are in the average home now. For older films you're paying a few quid for ones that are often included in Amazon Prime or Netflix. The TV on demand section used to have a wider variety of content, but now it seems to be just premium channel catch-up plus a small number of 'boxsets' each month. Increasingly those can be found on Amazon or Netflix at the same time, and at HD or decent SD picture quality rather than the low-bitrate, blocky MPEG2 streams that Virgin deliver many shows in.

Then there's the horrible menu structure brought over from the Liberate boxes - was it really not possible to implement a shim over that to give TiVo users a better experience? Trying to find something of interest is a tortuous experience, made worse by the organisation issues. Some series get their own sub-folder while some have all the episodes at the next level up. Some that start with 'The' are listed under 'T' while others ignore it. Sub-folders for a show don't get descriptions so you have to go inside to work out what they are. Metadata varies wildly - some shows have decent descriptions while others tell you next to nothing and of course there's no attractive image layout. Even looking to see what is new requires working through a ton of menus and a memory for what was there before. So rather than spend 15 minutes playing hunt the wumpus and annoying everyone else sitting in front of the TV it's easier to use another service instead. Virgin need a decent on-demand interface and more content that you can't find on every other service - more British archive TV would be great too and could even be a selling point against the US streaming services.


I really like Virgin broadband, which with the exception of occasional bumps before network upgrades has been consistently fast and stable. Unless there's some big improvements soon I think I've probably reached the end of the line with TV though.

So what would Virgin need to do to stop others cutting the cord?