April 29, 2008

Berkett in Madrid

According to the Broadband TV website Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett has said at the Cable Congress 2008 show in Madrid this week:

“We’re significantly improving our proposition in terms of HD and expanding our library, but we still have a long way to go before we hit the consumer mainstream that we aspire to. We need to educate consumers and drive experimentation.”

Berkett returned to familiar ground during his Wednesday evening keynote, putting his case for “economic access” to [Sky’s] pay-TV content and setting out the advantages of cable broadband over DSL to a willing audience.

What does this mean? Hopefully there will be more HD on demand available when the new iPlayer and 4OD services are introduced in May, and maybe a return of the Sky basics is pending, and possibly a Virgin IPTV offering is in the pipeline. Interesting.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wish virgin1 was in widescreen.
How annoying was it to watch there fanfare programme the sarah connor chronicles in 4:3...yuk

Nialli said...

It's coming. The originally planned to move to widescreen when the UKTV channels did, but it got delayed as the back-end systems needed revision to accomodate. Should be soon now.

Anonymous said...

Its still annoying as virgin media customers cant get the flagship channel in WS yet virgin's rival sky has the feed in WS.We can feel like second class citizens sometimes.
Another issue im having recently which is off topic so i apologise is pixelation especially when recording another channel or recording and watching On Demand.
I requested a boost to my signal at the box but a reply from VM was that this is a known issue and is being working on but with no time on a resolution.
Do you know what the ideal figures are in the technical menu?.

Nialli said...

Virgin1 is supplied to Sky in the same format as it is to VM. If you've seen it in widescreen, it's either local tv or box settings zooming in or Sky are fiddling with the signal (which would affect PQ).
I don't get pixelation at all on the channels I watch. It may be worth posting a query on the Cable Forum forum (!) as VM engineers frequently visit, or post to the tv support Newsgroup.