Pulled out of VirginTV and gone Freeview

[nick heppinstall]

I was paying around £80 per month for TV ( everything except movies and sport ), phone and 120mb broadband. For the past month I had a long and hard look at our viewing habits. The Mrs never watched anything apart from 1 to 5. I watched a couple of programmes on History and the little 'un was watching Netflix just about exclusively.

Broadband. I've always had the fastest service since around 1994. What do I use it for now ? The odd large game download on Steam. Do I need 120mb ? No I can just wait a bit longer.

So I've cancelled the tv and purchased one of these :

http://www.avforums.com/review/humax-hdr-2000t-fre...

So far I'm impressed. It's much faster and easier to use than my old V+ box.

I've also dropped down to 30mb broadband. Netflix streams fine in SuperHD and I'll just have to wait that bit longer.

Bill now £31.49 !

[johnS2000]

Did the same about a year ago .

Now it only take's second's to scroll through the guide and realize there's nothing on and go into smug mode when you point out to all that your not paying anything (other than licence fee) too watch advert's!!

[Piersman2]

I had a similar experience earlier this year when my bill seemed to be about to rise to £66/month.

I decided I would switch to Freeview and or Freesat and bin the TV XL package and phone as I only wanted their broadband.

I phoned up and went through everything and eventually agreed to switch to 60MB broadband + phone + minimum (free) tv channels.... for £27.50 a month. I also got a £100 rebate from them for some reason which meant I had about 3 months gratis.

The free tv channels is something they don't advertise, but if you're really not watching anything other than the standard main channels then they provide a free set of channels, similar to those available on Freeview. Sky do a similar thing as well. It even has about 5 HD channels included in the price.

The only thing it doesn't do is support the + boxes, no record, replay or pause etc... But seeing as that functionality costs you about £5 a month, and I never used it, I had no issues dropping it. It just meant they had to send me a new simpler box to replace the Virgin+ box which now sits in my garage gathering dust.

Their customer services people are actually quite good, the couple of times I've gone through this with them over the last 5 years they've been very approachable and helpful taking the time to try and work out what suits you best. It's a shame for the CS agents that the packages structures, bundles and billing make it almost impossible to just get what you want without trying to loads of variations to get the best balance of what you need vs what you're prepared to pay.

So, in summary, it's worth asking about the 'free' TV channels if you're not overly concerned about watching MTV or Sky 1 or all the other various +1s, etc...

[nick heppinstall]

:-) That Humax has a nice feature that shows you all the films / documentaries / dramas that are on for the week so you can just blast through the list frantically pressing the record button.

Excellent stuff ! When I displayed this technical marvel to the Mrs she didn't seem that impressed though. She was however happy enough with the £50 saving .....

I guess she's not going to be that pleased when I spend it on beer every month :-D