So,
I made a decision today. (yay)
I have the Virgin VIP package which gives me:
A HD V+ box
A regular cable box
Full channel lineup including sports and movies
Phone rental and unlimited calls
20mb Broadband
Now this is costing £88.75 a month.
Jesus Christ
Thats £1065 a year.
Oh my god.
We don’t even watch TV half of the time, most of the stuff we record on the V+ box and watch later.
I’ve decided that nearly everything we watch is on terrestrial – I made this observation when we were away in Whitby and only had 4 channels. Didn’t miss a thing.
I’ve ordered the Play TV box for the PS3. Its a USB box which turns your PS3 into a freeview PVR. It cost me £60 from amazon. I’ve also bought a 320GB SATA drive (£70) to swap in for my 60GB to give me some extra space (with the game installs theres not much room left for recording).
So the plan.
Test out the playTV over the coming days and weeks.
If we have a decent freeview signal and it works as expected I’m going to ditch 90% of the Virgin services.
Do we really need the home phone? We’ve bought got mobiles with 1200 minutes free a month. The only person who EVER rings me on the home phone number is my uncle Mark and thats when he has a PC problem – the phones can go (although if its only £11 a month and it keeps the cost of the BB down, I’ll keep it but use it for incoming calls only).
The TV service is going completely. Over 200 channels of shite. It won’t be missed. Freeview has Dave and Nuts TV (wahey).
Broadband.
Hmmmm.
This is where it gets tricky. I have no BT phoneline, well there is one, but its not active. Which means Cable is the way to go at the moment. I also prefer the cable service to ADSL.
So, line rental should be around £11. It’ll be around £35 maximum (I’m hoping its going to be less) for the broadband. So I’ll be looking at less than £50 for the two per month and £600 a year. Mucho fantastico savings.
Once the PlayTV has arrived and I’ve had chance to test it, I’ll feedback. I’ll also post about how I get on with Virgin when I phone them to cancel half of the services 
**Update**
Just spoken to customer services and it would be £11 a month for the telephone and £30 a month for 20mb. New customers get 20mb for £10 a month for the first 6 months and £20 a month after that. Bastards.
I’ll speak to retentions when I phone back next week and tell them I’ll go get a BT line put in.
