NOW TV Entertainment price rise

Now TV has announced that its Entertainment Pass will be going up by 12% to £9.99 a month in September (unless you're on an offer - I'm on a half price deal until next year).
The price of this service has crept up a few times recently and I don't think it's quite the bargain it used to be. Like many Virgin customers I only have it for Sky Atlantic programmes but, with this price rise and the Boost HD meaning it will cost me an extra £12.99/m next year I will probably drop it once my deal ends and just dip in when something on Atlantic really demands my attention.

The Horizon 4 software on Virgin Media Ireland's V6 box

Virgin Media Ireland support pages for the Horizon 4 customers: https://www.virginmedia.ie/virgintv360support/

And this one is particularly interesting: https://www.virginmedia.ie/virgintv360support/functions-and-features/ 

The V6 appears to have been renamed the V360 with the new software.

Horizon 4 - Virgin's new software running on the V6

This is interesting: a clip on YouTube of Virgin Media Ireland's V6 box, running Horizon 4

Whatever happened to Sky Q without a dish?

Back in 2017 Sky announced it was to introduce the Sky Q TV without the need for a satellite dish. There were no dates, just a series of vague promises that it was 'coming soon'.
Now, Pocket-lint has confirmed that the broadband-only Sky Q plans have taken a back seat:
"We have been working on it," said Sky's group chief product officer, Fraser Stirling, during a briefing on the new features coming to Sky Q in July. He revealed that, in the UK, IP (Internet Protocol) delivery of content will be more beneficial to the company's existing Sky Q platform in the short term. "We will move more and more of our services - like in how the product works - to be levered over IP and that will include some channels. You will find linear content, VOD content, and other experiences that are going to be IP based, with a really solid backbone: that hybrid delivery part, which is satellite. [It] is going to play a key part of our future for quite some time."
So, whilst it's not dead, a pure IP Q service is not being developed for launch any time soon and any Virgin Media customers waiting for a dish-less Sky offering as an alternative to VM should cross it off their list for now. (Actually, make that "for NowTV", which is a viable alternative to cable if you want to move to Sky for your TV.)
Incidentally, my contract with Virgin Media has just come up for renewal and I gave serious consideration to the NowTV and BT alternatives (local planning laws prohibit me having a dish). After a number of calls to Virgin and the others I found no-one could beat Virgin's offer for the next 18 months, which I guess is good news for fans of this blog.

All 4 on the V6 only standard definition for now

Channel 4 has confirmed that the new All 4 app on the V6 boxes isn't high definition (yet):

"We would advise that HD content is not currently available on the new Virgin app, we had hoped to have it at inception, but the pandemic has delayed this. We do hope to make HD available at some point, but unfortunately we don't have a date at this time."

Broadband outages: Virgin says sorry

Virgin Media has finally apologised after a major network outage left customers without internet access in London and other areas for six hours in late June.

The cable company claimed that the broadband outage on Thursday, June 25th affected a "relatively small pocket of customers in the capital". I was one of them, and I know lots of people outside the capital suffered too: it wasn't the first time during lockdown I found myself activating my mobile's personal hotspot rather than being able to use the Wi-Fi I pay so much for. And for a communications company, they can be frustratingly slow in communicating with their customers and rather economic with details - the silence was deafening.

Virgin now say that the problem was caused by "signal interference between its broadband and TV services at one site", rather than hot weather or over-capacity. The issue was resolved by the early afternoon.

“This morning some of our customers in London experienced broadband and TV issues which have now been fixed. This did not hit all customers in London and it was not a nationwide outage,” the group said. It declined to say how many people had been affected. “While our engineers worked as quickly as possible to solve the problem, we know how frustrating it is to be without our services and we apologise to those affected.”

Well, that's okay then, isn't it?

Meanwhile, Virgin's long-promised upgrade to Docis 3.1, which promises greater speeds and reliability, continues. Details here.

Virgin Media service changes

Virgin Media has announced some significant changes to services this week.

• Virgin is making its 500Mbps broadband available to broadband-only customers. New and existing customers can take its M500 Fibre broadband with any package. That means you can simply subscribe to broadband-only or add this upgrade to any TV and phone bundle.
• Virgin Media’s next-generation Gig1 broadband service is already available across Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester, Reading and Southampton and now it has a lower price; those who have it in their street can subscribe from £64 per month
• As we all know Virgin Media users could only sign up to a new deal for 12 months, which meant, after a year, the prices shoot up to the firm's ridiculous 'standard' rates unless you get on the phone and negotiate a deal. Sky and BT offer 18 months contracts - at last Virgin is doing the same.
• Virgin Media’s Oomph bundles are changing. Virgin Media has more than doubled the mobile data allowance that is available with many of its Oomph SIMs and customers who have already signed up to an Oomph bundle with either a 2GB, 5GB or 15GB of mobile data can more than double their data allowance by moving to the equivalent SIM in the new bundle line-up - without needing to re-contract and at no extra cost. And if you' have Virgin's Ultimate Oomph broadband speeds are increasing to 600mbps at no extra cost as the speed tier becomes available. 
• Virgin Media’s Personal Picks now offer better value so customers can build a personalised TV service for less. Personalised picks start at £7 and each subsequent pack costs £5 per month. Personal Picks were previously priced at £10 for the first pick with each subsequent Pick costing £7 per month.

Disney channels leaving Virgin Media

Not great news for Virgin Media customers who worship at the altar of the mighty Disney corporation: by October 1st 2020 UK customers will only be able to access Disney content by subscribing to the paid streaming service, Disney+.

As Disney+ is not yet a feature found on our Virgin V6 boxes, Virgin customers will have to access the Disney+ platform via NowTV or through other devices.

It could be a deal-breaker, not just for families but also fans of the Marvel and Star Wars films, too. 

The three TV channels being cut from regular Virgin Media services are The Disney Channel, Disney XD, and Disney Junior. Other Disney-owned channels, such as Fox and National Geographic, will still be available on Virgin Media and the Sky Cinema Disney channel is still around, as are a selection of Marvel, Pixar and Disney films on the other Sky Cinema channels. I suspect thought that the writing's on the wall for them, too.

C4 on demand finally in high definition

Thanks to James for the following:

C4's CatchUp on Virgin service on the V6 boxes is now thirty days of HD goodness. All of the C4 boxsets are in full HD too. 

I still don't know if the shows on the new All 4 app on the V6 are in HD - does anybody? The catalogue in the app is far more extensive than the Virgin On Demand service but still has a few notable exceptions (Scrubs and ER). Good to see that the Seinfeld episodes are all in widescreen although they look like SD to my eyes.