Freeview recorders / Returning to Sky from Virgin

Ballard

Bigphil1474 wrote: »

I have had a Youview+ box for a few months, and all series recording has worked well (no missing beginnings or endings). Never used a Humax, but I've seen pretty much all positive comments on these forums about them.
If you are only going to SKy for BB and phone, you could check out PlusNet (who I am with). They gave me the Youview box for free, and I get some subscription channels for free for 12 months (on an 18 month contract), £5 a month after that. Can't remember, but the YV box may only be free with fibre BB.

This looked rather good but I can see no mention of the free box on their website so that offer has probably gone. I shall bear plusnet in mind though.

Ballard

Virgin sent me a letter yesterday and my monthly bill is going up by £3.49 which has made me even less inclined to stay with them. It's not that I can't afford it but I don't feel that I'm getting good value for money from the service.

Ballard

I think that I'll get this one:

http://www.richersounds.com/product/digital-set-top-boxes/panasonic/dmrhwt150eb/pana-dmrhwt150eb-blk

It has some excellent reviews on this website (although less favourable on John Lewis) but I'll buy it from John Lewis as they will price match it and I can pick it up locally rather than carry it home on the train.

My plan is to try it out before cancelling Virgin and moving broadband.

DCFC79

Ballard wrote: »

When I had Sky and a program that was due to record ran late, my box would recognise this and would still record it correctly but my Virgin box just records at the specified times irrespective.

Do any Freeview recorders work as per Sky or are they the only ones?

I do sometimes like the way that my Virgin box records programmes at random and puts them in the 'suggestions' folder. Most of the time it's something that I have no interest in but it does sometimes throw up a gem that I'd missed. They should really have programed the box a bit better, though, as I had several hours of 'BBC Three is now online' waiting to be viewed last week.

You can change it so if any programs were to run late it would carry on recording but the issue is you need to do it for every program which is a faff.

Maybe Virgins rival to Sky Q will be more intuitive and notice if a recorded is running late it will carry on recording.

DCFC79

Ballard wrote: »

Virgin sent me a letter yesterday and my monthly bill is going up by £3.49 which has made me even less inclined to stay with them. It's not that I can't afford it but I don't feel that I'm getting good value for money from the service.

Ring them up and cancel, see what you get offered to stay if you want to of course.

Ballard

DCFC79 wrote: »

Ring them up and cancel, see what you get offered to stay if you want to of course.

I plan to do that tonight but from what I've read on here they don't bend over backwards to keep customers.

Cornucopia

Ballard wrote: »

This looked rather good but I can see no mention of the free box on their website so that offer has probably gone. I shall bear plusnet in mind though.

All of the main ADSL BB ISPs now have a TV offer...

https://www.plus.net/tv/

https://www.talktalk.co.uk/shop/tv-and-broadband

https://broadband.ee.co.uk/ee-tv

https://www.productsandservices.bt.com/products/bt-tv/

Ballard

Thanks. I shall look at those (probably tonight)

I won't be going with TalkTalk though. I had such a poor service with them a few years ago that I won't touch them again. No phone or internet for 6 weeks and probably a total of around 50 hours on the phone to them to get it sorted. Half an hour on hold then cut off repeatedly. The one thing that did work in that time was their system for collecting direct debits. The promised refund never materialised but I just gave up on that.

Ballard

I've just come off the phone from Virgin. I was fully intending to cancel but they offered me £40 for 6 months followed by £43 for 6 months. Even then I wasn't sure so I was offered BT Sports which I declined as I'm not a football fan and was eventually offered 6 months Netflix which I took.

I have now renewed the line saver which saves a month or two line rental over the year and gets my monthly bill down a further £19 per month.

Thanks to everyone for the advice even though it was only DCFC79s advice that I took in the end and I'd have done that anyway.