£50 Tivo activation fee! must be the new word for lifetime subscription.
Virgin Media hints at TiVo via Fibre phone lines
A friend of mine has just done a customer survey for Virgin Media, and come across the attached question! Just hope it's progressed!
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"Get superfast Fibre Optic Broadband down your phone line"
Surely I'm not the only one to see glaring error in that statement???
Our phone lines are copper. How are VM going to magically transform them into Fibre?
Surely it should say "get superfast broadband at speeds equivalent to Fibre"?
Martin
Surely I'm not the only one to see glaring error in that statement???
Our phone lines are copper. How are VM going to magically transform them into Fibre?
Surely it should say "get superfast broadband at speeds equivalent to Fibre"?
Martin
BT is installing Fibre To the Cabinet in a large number of exchanges in the South East of England where there is no Virgin Media coverage in the next 12 months. This includes my mum's exchange where there is no Virgin Media coverage. So it is actually a fibre optic connection apart from the last piece of copper wire of a few tens or a few hundreds of feet to the home."Get superfast Fibre Optic Broadband down your phone line"
Surely I'm not the only one to see glaring error in that statement???
Our phone lines are copper. How are VM going to magically transform them into Fibre?
Surely it should say "get superfast broadband at speeds equivalent to Fibre"?
On top of this my local village exchange in Surrey where I live where there is no LLU, let alone Virgin cable, was one of the winners of the BT Race To Infinity, which is a BT Retail sponsored initiative to assess demand for fibre in village exchange with 1,000 lines or more. Under that scheme around two thirds of premises in the area will be upgraded to FTTP - Fibre To The Premises. So on my home exchange it will actually truly be possible to get a fibre optic connection to Virgin via your own phone line in many homes.
In any event you will note that it was I who previously forecast several times on this forum that Virgin would expand its coverage by using BT's new fibre optic network on exchanges where it has no cable coverage of its own. This is what is now probably coming to pass. BT plans to upgrade every exchange in the country to Fibre To The Cabinet in the next eight years (Fibre To The Premises will probably come later for those who want it if the customer is willing to pay the extra cost and/or takes a long enough contract on a high end broadband product). At that stage Virgin Media should be able to provide their service to every home in the UK, albeit that their profit margin per connection may be lower.
So clearly I was right in my forecast about Virgin using BT's fibre network to expand its coverage. This makes perfect sense as BT Wholesale/Openreach needs to maximise the return on its investment in fibre and government competition policies means it can't expect to do it all as BT Retail.
Twinned with the announcement yesterday of Formula 1 moving mainly to Sky this is all highly significant stuff since Sky does not have LLU at either my home exchange or my mum's exchange so is a very expensive way to get broadband and subscription tv. However getting Sky Sports through Virgin in conjunction with a Tivo could be a fairly good deal, especially for those of use with access to BT FTTC or FTTP but no Sky llu equipment at the local exchange.
So it looks like Virgin Tivo here I come, potentially as soon as the first half of 2012.
I thought Sky Go was only SD (since it works on even a bog standard copper wire ADSL Max connection)? Virgin Tivo over BT Infinity will be HD. I thought you of all people appreciated the massive benefits of watching a program in HD rather than SD?
Also BT Infinity broadband is much faster than normal 8MB ADSL MAX or up to 24MB ADSL2+ LLU.
Anything that allows me directly paying money to the monopolistic Rupert Murdoch empire in favour of the merely free market loving Richard Branson would give me the greatest possible pleasure.
I have three Reciva Logik Internet radios I picked up from Dixons for £35 each.
Guess what but standalone internet radios are now completely dead and all the marketing push is behind crappy old DAB radios.
The reason is that DAB is a constrained platform that can be dominated by the Beeb and a couple of commercial broadcasters and that is how big bully boy marketing men working for large jackbooted corporates like things.
If you think that we are now going to have individual subscriptions with each channel we watch then dream on. Apart from anything else Mr and Mrs Average find 20 monthly subs to pay far too complicated. Channels mainly prosper due to marketing and where they are in the EPG as much as due to decent content. If you say to people you can listen to any one of 10,000 channels (Reciva Internet Radio) they just don't want that because its just too much choice. What they want is about 100 channels which a clever marketing machine tells them are the best thing in creation out there and easily worth paying 50 quid a month for.
What people want is something that all their neighbours have and that marketing men tell them is the best thing sliced bread. If you think that people always choose what is actually technically the best product then you have clearly learned far less about life than I had thought in your last 40+ years on this planet.
Take T3 for instance. Do people really buy it because its actually interesting or worth reading or simply because it has a jazzy cover with a stylish image and a distribution deal with all of the country's main magazine wholesalers?
How patronising.
People seem to manage just fine picking which media they want in other areas.
Marketing is important, but you are dead wrong if you think content isn't the primary driver.
Again with the patronising.
You need both. If it's not worth reading noone would buy it. People are not the idiots you seem to think they are.Take T3 for instance. Do people really buy it because its actually interesting or worth reading or simply because it has a jazzy cover with a stylish image and a distribution deal with all of the country's main magazine wholesalers?
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