Virgin Media
Before the advent of TV delivered over the internet, Virgin was the traditional choice if you didn’t want a satellite dish clamped to the side of your house. That was thanks to a very expensive fibre-optic cable laid under the UK’s streets. Not only is that network good for the delivery of television, it’s enabling Virgin Media to offer up to 10Mbps internet access as standard and deliver on-demand programming.

Available features: A mixture of cable television, broadband internet, landline telephone and mobile phone.

Our option: Highest (XL) package for TV with associated Personal Video Recorder (PVR), Medium package for broadband.

PVR (V+)
The obvious advantage with Virgin’s V+ box is the ability to record two channels, while still watching a third programme. That trumps Sky+, which can record two at once but leaves you with no other live TV.
Services are accessed through a Home key, which opens up easy-to-follow menus (although at first it is possible to confuse this week’s catch-up TV with the overall TV on Demand service).
V+ also offers all the usual features of a PVR, including the ability to pause live TV, with space to record 80 hours of normal telly. We have found the pause feature annoying on a few occasions, where we realise we’re not going to have time to watch something we were holding. Press the Record button and all you get is a message telling you it’s not possible to save something on pause to the hard drive.
Another downside of the V+ is the attached price. A one-off installation cost of £150 is backed up by a £5 monthly fee if you don’t subscribe to the XL package.
And yet another downside is that a box with a HDMI output and HD capabilities has such a woeful number of channels – especially when compared with Sky’s monster selection.

On-Demand
Virgin’s on-demand offering beats the pants off Sky and BT’s efforts (although if you have a PC and use Sky’s Anytime internet service to download films, sports and other entertainment you’re catching up nicely). Virgin splits its on-demand service into different parts. The premium service will see Virgin charging you between £2 and £3.50 for movies. At least if you’re a V+ subscriber then access to the mammoth list of TV programmes is free. Thankfully there’s so much available here you should find something to your tastes. Shows are replaced as Virgin’s license to broadcast them expires, but you can see how long you have left to view a series or individual programme and there’s a What’s New section so you don’t have to trawl through the full list to find the latest stuff.
As well as television programmes, there’s also a selection of on-demand music for XL customers. On-demand content does take a while to connect and suffers from a few other minor issues (fast forward isn’t brilliant; pause will cut out after a long period and end the programme; and you can’t record any of this stuff to the V+ hard drive “due to licensing restrictions”), but it’s still a superb resource. Better yet, there are no ads and even though the controls can be a bit slow, at least the option to pause, rewind and stop is available.

Broadband internet
The biggest disappointment is that there’s no wireless as standard. Almost every other broadband service comes with a wireless router these days (including Sky and BT’s offerings). If you want to make the service wireless, you’ll need to buy a special cable router. Since this plugs into the existing cable modem, that’s two boxes running instead of one. Still, our Belkin N1 Wireless Router has performed admirably and the connection has worked fine with no major outages in eight months.

Customer Service
Having started off with superb customer service at our first residence, moving Virgin to a new address brought a few challenges with it. We spent 50 minutes on the phone trying to rebook engineers who turned up without telling us they were coming. And even though one person eventually told us there were relevant notes on our account, it was impossible to find the department who dealt with it as we were continually passed around. In the end we gave up and resorted to waiting for the company to come back to us.

Cost
Varied packages: The most basic (Virgin calls it ‘medium’) television includes a V box (not V+ PVR) and comes free with an £11 per month phone package that includes unlimited free weekend calls to regular local and national UK numbers (not mobiles, international, 0845, 0870, premium rate, etc). Bundles of two packages can be taken for £20 a month (eg, mobile phone and medium broadband; large TV and medium landline; or medium broadband and medium phone, which comes with free medium TV). Bundles of three packages start at £30 a month and bundles of all four services (television, internet, phone and mobile) start at £40.

Overall
Virgin definitely suffered a blow when it lost its access to Sky One and other popular channels. But it has fought back nicely with a great selection of on-demand content and increased broadband speeds. However, customer service could do with a kick up the bum and HD content needs to be vastly increased.

Verdict: 7.5/10