Sky vs. Virgin

We have Virgin, and our contract will be up in November.  A Sky salesman came by yesterday, and managed to entice me into considering switching before I could get him to go away.  They are offering us free installation and equipment (HD DVR).  The DVR has a bigger memory than our V+ box.  They have more HD channels.  The thing that snagged me is that they are offering an "any time" calling plan for £5 a month.  All calls to the UK and a handful of countries (including the US) are included provided we hang up before an hour is up and call back.

Their line up is hard to figure out as they have these packages.  You get the Variety pack as a part of your basic subscription.  We'd have to add at least two more to include all our current favourites (with a lot of flotsam included).  Good thing is the packages are only £1 a month.  They are including a wireless routre which we need, and a basic free broadband.

So my questions are the following:

1)I use Virgin On Demand and the catch-up players *a lot*.  I saw that Sky has an online player that tries to compete and is planning to release one that plays on the box.  What sort of things are on the online one (or the box one if it's gone line)?  Is it just a "catch-up" service (iPlayer, 4OD, a few other channels with things for about a week) or does it include things like entire series and stuff that hasn't been played recently?

2)Has anyone had both and can compare things like the channel selection?  What about downtime?  What packages did you get?  Did you bother with the movie channels?

3)How good/bad is their free broadband?

4)Customer service?  It can't be worse than Virgin, right?

5)Anyone cancel a contract early?  What sort of penalties did you suffer?

We had Sky, and if you search for my old posts I'm sure there are at least a few rants about how terrible their customer service is, so I won't go into it again here.  I get the feeling that all the TV/phone/broadband providers are in a race to the bottom as far as that goes, so it probably doesn't matter anyway.

The thing that snagged me is that they are offering an "any time" calling plan for £5 a month.  All calls to the UK and a handful of countries (including the US) are included provided we hang up before an hour is up and call back.

That was a good deal, and worked just as advertised.  The only issue we had was waiting for Sky to inform BT that Sky was our long distance provider.  It took much longer than I'd expected (about 2 months if I recall correctly), and in the meantime we were making long distance calls thinking they were going through Sky.  They eventually gave us a refund on all the charges we'd racked up with BT, but it took a lot of complaining on the phone and in writing before that happened.

2)Has anyone had both and can compare things like the channel selection?  What about downtime?  What packages did you get?  Did you bother with the movie channels?

I can't compare the two, but I thought the selection was pretty good.  We had the basic package plus the variety pack, and during the NFL season we got Sky Sports.  (They were very good about letting us switch that on and off without penalty, which surprised me.)  The movie channels were pretty much the same as HBO in the US; one or two big blockbusters each month with a lot of crap in between, so we didn't get them.  (We'd use the box office pay-per-view if we wanted a movie; the selection there was good.)  There was very little down time; maybe once or twice in 3 years we'd lose reception, but never for very long.

3)How good/bad is their free broadband?

We lived a long way from the exchange, so we only got about 1.5 Mbps, but that wasn't Sky's fault.  There was no USB port on the router, so we couldn't print remotely, which was a small bummer, but otherwise it was fine.

4)Customer service?  It can't be worse than Virgin, right?

Goddam awful.  We had constant problems with our Sky+ box (the non-HD one) and they wanted us to pay £65 to have someone come fix it (i.e. hand us a refurbished one out of the van).  I asked if we could get the fee waived as we'd been customers for 3 years, but no.  The only time they offered to have someone come out for free was when I called to cancel the service completely.  It took 20 minutes of very firm "no" from me before they finally quit trying to keep me as a customer.  If they'd tried that hard earlier they might've been successful.

5)Anyone cancel a contract early?  What sort of penalties did you suffer?

Our initial contract was long over when we cancelled, but they still charged us for one month for not giving them 30 days notice.  They're total bastards.

Hope that helped and wasn't too ranty. 

We have Sky and haven't had an issues yet.

Except for a big fat pigeon that keeps sitting on the dish blocking the signal. 

I can hardly blame them for that, but it does make my husband yell at the birds which is amusing.

My boyfriend has Sky for TV which I use liberally when there. 

He has Virgin for phone/internet because Sky doesn't own the lines or something in his area so we would only be able to get a really crap Broadband plan if he went with them for that.  It's a shame to have to miss out on that phone deal because of it.

Having dealt with both companies' Customer Service, you could probably count them as equals. 

I think we're both pretty happy with it for the most part, though.  No real complaints.

I'm not sure what the exact packages are, but we've found the movie channels to be pretty much useless like camoscato said.  Every once in a while there will be something on them that we might want to watch, but we're probably going to get rid if those soon since we never really watch them.

I like the Sky channels because they carry the American programs I like (Fringe, House, Bones, Lost...not that there's a shortage of House here).  I've not used the online Sky on Demand because we usually manage to DVR everything by having it record the whole series of a program.

Yeah, we have the Sky channels except the movies.  Basically, we have the XL lineup-

http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/tv/channels/index.html

Problem is that I can't really find something that actually lists all the Sky listings in an easily readable format or (even better) one that compares the two.  One of the problems I see with Skyplayer is if we get the free broadband package, and they don't put Skyplayer on the boxes for whatever reason, we're forced to watch things like Skyplayer or even things like iPlayer online and eat our limit.

Thanks for the responses so far.

I've had Sky since about 1992.
I have Virgin for phone/broadband.

When I signed up for Virgin because I wanted the broadband they offered me the basic TV package for 12 months free. So I had that in another room, I had no end of trouble with the box freezing up and needing to unplug it.

So I prefer Sky for TV but it's not the cheapest solution to have a set up as I have.

The channel line up is bigger on Sky.....the reason I didn't go with Virgine at the time was because they didn't have NASN (now ESPN America), although now they do, and didn't have all the Sky Sports channels so wouldn't have been able to get the NFL.

Where it probably does lose out to Virgin is with the on demand service. They've tried something called "Sky Anytime" which involved them downloading selected programmes (often 1st episodes of new series coming up) to an otherwise unused part of your hard drive, but I turned this feature off because I felt most things I wanted to watch I would set up anyway and all it seemed to do for me was have wear of the hard drive.