Virgin Tivo Stall at Victoria Station Till July 29th - Give Them Your Views

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This is just to let you all know that last Thursday morning (July 21st 2011) I came across a large temporary stand on the concourse of Victoria mainline railway station exclusively marketing the new Virgin Tivo rather than just Virgin Media products in general. Unfortunately I didn't have any form of picture taking device with me at the time as my normal mobile phone has just broken and I am using an ancient mobile phone replacement temporarily.

Naturally you can imagine that this acted somewhat like a red rag to the proverbial bull and I was eager to let them have my views.

In answer to my question as to why my perfectly good S1 Tivo no longer had an official Tivo EPG available to it when I could not upgrade to a Virgin Media Tivo they had no answer or excuse to offer. In answer to my question as to why Virgin Media failed to ever extend its cable footprint beyond 50% of UK homes they made the usual noises about trials hanging fibre from BT poles but offered little real hope that anything would change anytime soon. I was eager to point out to them that both my current countryside exchange and my mother's rural exchange are due to be upgraded to 48Mbps BT Infinity in January 2012 but that Virgin Media has no equivalent plans to extend their footprint to cover their exchange areas.

Some bloke called Mark was on the stand who said he was a senior Virgin sales person (at management level rather than of the doorstep kind) but he couldn't offer any real justification as to why the Virgin Tivo is only available to 50% of the UK. His only eventual suggestion was that I needed to move home in order to have a new Virgin Tivo.

My suggestion is to go along and give Virgin your view if you will be getting a train up to London Victoria during the rest of this week as the stand is there till the end of the month (Friday July 29th). It seems to be manned Monday to Friday at least between say 8am and 6pm and possibly a little later. I am sure some of you here will enjoy the chance to give Virgin Media your view directly on the non availability of the Virgin Media Tivo to the area you live in and/or the excessive cost of the service for those of you who do live in the Virgin Media cable area.

 

I think it would on the whole be a good deal more productive to simply proactively give Virgin your views. If they get a lot of cross S1 Tivo owners visiting them I am sure it will have an impact.

 

But they need to find a way to also offer their service UK wide even though it won't be as profitable percentage wise as in their self cabled areas.

 

They already have been opened up for this purpose through www.topuptv.com who offer a package that includes Sky channels on multiplexes run by both commercial operators and by the BBC (who Ofcom allowed to rent this space to TopUpTv to ironically broadcast Sky Sports channels even though that means the BBC can now only offer one red button channel on Freeview most of the time compared to up to five on satellite during events like Wimbledon or the Olympics).

But anyhow Freeview doesn't have the bandwidth to waste on doing this in my opinion, especially with the advents of bandwidth hungry FTA tv services from the existing broadcaster as well on Freeview plus the inefficient SD and HD simulcast situation that goes with this. The only proper competition to Sky can be offered in a non Virgin area is by Virgin distributing its service over high speed broadband. BT's plans for rolling out BT Infinity fibre optic lines are such that they will have provided fibre to the cabinet to the whole country within seven years. In order to maximise its investment I expect that BT Openreach/Wholesale will also want to rent its fibre optic line capacity to competitor services like Virgin even if Ofcom does not mandate it to do so in the interests of competition.

It is true this won't be Virgin cable in the conventional sense but it will be the Virgin brand competing with Sky and these days brands and competition between brands are as important to the government and Ofcom as there being multiple different physical delivery platforms. In theory a delivery platform for television or the internet to the home via wireless broadband (WiMax or 4G/5G) could also happen but talk of wireless broadband having sufficient bandwidth to do this seems to be a case of this year, next year, some time, never..............

 

In my opinion they do "need to" because unlike NTL or Telewest Virgin is a major brand and major brands usually want to distribute their products nationwide not least for reasons such as return on advertising investment in the brand.

Distribution of multiple ADSL broadband brands in exchange areas where only BT owns the final loop to the home or has any exchange equipment (there is no LLU equipment) has still been used as a very effective means of competition to ensure that BT Retail does not charge and excessive price for its product.

Anyhow I think we are beginning to drift severely off topic in relation to Virgin's Tivo stand at Victoria station.