SKY vs Virgin Media

Strumms

Guys,

the folks are SKY TV customers going on 25 years.

they are weighing up changing to Virgin media.

has anyone done the same and can you kindly shed any light please re: pros and cons of such a move…?

the mother is slightly hesitant as she likes sky HD… but my Dad is all go as he’s a little underwhelmed by a response to an issue that was incidentally of his own making regarding fûcking with the sky box and loosing a few channels during an outage ( don’t ask ) but regardless…

any help appreciated.

bassy

Do people still subscribe and pay for sky,sky is Stonehenge.

Get them a firestick;)

Capt'n Midnight

What channels do they watch ?

What are their must-have channels ?

Strumms

both like all documentary channels, comedy stuff like Gold, and the standard channels of course… occasional sport.

Kurn

In my opinion, having used both systems. I'd go for SKY unless there is a price difference.

SKY seems to be interested in developing its platform and channel choice, yes it can be expensive ( you need to ring every 6 months for bargains). But they know their business and it is evolving.

Virgin television seems to be a product that Virgin has long forgotten about - and they throw the odd "new" channel at it once in a while. The latest "bonus" you get is "Virgin More" and "Virgin four"...I hope you like "the chase". it's on a lot.

Their latest box "360" is not bad, but very basic in terms of what it should be. In terms of channel picture quality, it seems pretty good and I don't think they charge for HD. The on-demand stuff is nowhere near as good as Skys, but for the basic stuff, it's fine. The 360 box is also pretty easy to use and has a nice little remote... Virgin has also just added Sky Nature and Sky Docs to its lineup.

I hope that helps somewhat. And as with every response on here is just one person's opinion.

I'd definitely ignore the suggestion of a fire stick for your parents.

Dial Hard

Sky interface is far, far superior, imo. My parents have Virgin and I absolutely loathe it. Get them to tell Sky they're cancelling and they should get a good sweetener deal to stay.

One eyed Jack

I didn’t think ‘twould be fair if I just said stay with Sky because I find them far superior to Virgin in terms of hardware, quality, performance and choice for tv channels. Sky is just far more convenient and less frustrating than Virgin.

(also just got another six months free Apple TV subscription from Sky Rewards, which is handy, because it’s not worth paying for IMO)

icdg

One key consideration may be that Virgin now require you to take their broadband and TV together, Sky are now the only major pay TV platform that are broadband neutral or indeed for their satellite service you don’t technically need broadband at all (though you will need a LAN of some sort for Sky Q multiroom).

Sky have far more channels but moreover their satellite service is an open platform and you will have access to a whole pile of channels that are FTA on Astra and not part of the Sky package.

I haven’t used a 360 box and can’t comment on the UI. I am more familiar with the older Horizon and Mediabox platforms and Horizon in particular didn’t win any awards on the performance front - trying to do too much on hardware that just wasn’t able for it but I am led to believe 360 is much better.