News - Eurosport HD makes its way to Virgin Media

[HEXUS]

Virgin Media's HD channel count will rise to eight with the addition of Eurosport HD in April.

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[MonkeyL]

Not a subscriber myself but have a few mates who use Virgin HD. All are not very happy about the quality (which is terrible). When I show them my BBC HD via freesat they can't believe how good it is compared to theirs.

Says it all really.

[shaithis]

I believe the cable bandwidth is seriously limited and was saturated a while ago......I can only imagine that other channels have had to suffer PQ and/or SQ to shoehorn another channel in....

[cjs150]

I have virgin HD and it is good...but no Sky Movies HD or Sky sports HD is a real downer.

The quality is very good on the HD channels

[scasiello]

Not a subscriber myself but have a few mates who use Virgin HD. All are not very happy about the quality (which is terrible). When I show them my BBC HD via freesat they can't believe how good it is compared to theirs.

Says it all really.

I've had HD via cable (then Telewest now Virgin) since 2007 and upgraded my TV to a Panasonic Plasma with built-in Freesat in 2009, the BBC HD picture quality on cable has always been excellent, and since getting the new TV I've been able to compare BBC HD on both platforms, the picture quality on cable always exceeds that of Freesat (is sharper & more detailed). Also bitrate of BBC HD on cable has not been reduced as it has recently on Freesat/SKY.

I can only assume that your mates TV is inferior to yours or they have it setup incorrectly.

I believe the cable bandwidth is seriously limited and was saturated a while ago......I can only imagine that other channels have had to suffer PQ and/or SQ to shoehorn another channel in....

Cable bandwidth is somewhat limited, but Virgin are in the process of ceasing analogue broadcasts (started in 2009), this is what is enabling the promised additional HD channels and the future increase of Broadband speeds to upto 200mbps.

[Rave]

Sounds good. Eurosport back in the day used to be mint, with non-stop skiing, ski-jumping, and tractor pulling, which is frankly the greatest sport evar. But when Eurosport GB became the main offering it was crap, bloody football all the time etc.

My wife still watches the tennis on Eurosport, and tennis in HD is cool, because apart from anything else you can pretty much pre-empt line calls.

TBH what pisses me off most is that we don't have the ITV HD simulcast on Virgin, despite Virgin TV owning about 20% of ITV. WTF is going on there? The V+ box is a really great piece of kit, it really will record two HD streams while allowing you to watch a third, and the picture quality is fine. I originally bought my 42" LCD to watch the 2008 Olympics in HD, and I'm glad I did, because I enjoyed it very much. But as it stands, it looks as if I'll need a Freesat HD box to watch half the England matches in HD, despite bunging Virgin about £60 quid a month all-in.

[pp05]

A relative had v+ installed at there home. I'm not that impressed by the 'HD' even though I'm sold on HD. It looks very compressed. I told them not to expect awesomeness on a goodmans lcd but even so.

Do they even broadcast 1080?