https://recombu.com/digital/article/...sports-1-and-2

To summarise, from June 2016:

- It will not be possible to take Sky Sports 1 or Sky Sports 2 on their own.

- The cost is being increased by £2.50 on both Sky and VM.

- The £7 HD charge remains the same at £7 per month.

- The very least you could pay on VM if you want Sky Sports will now be £51.75 per month.

Shouldn't that be £31.75?

I think the reference to £51.75 includes the cost of the minimum standalone TV package (More TV) with Tivo.
You could actually get it cheaper (£46.75) by taking a VHD box instead.

As SKY SPORTS can bump up some packages to over £100. This can be a hard swallow.

In aid for people to afford this a SKY SPORTS season ticket would be most welcome at this time in my opinion.

Virgin please consider a season ticket again. Retaining subscriptions is in the interest of business

Can you not get Sky Sports with TV M??

It is planned to discontinue the V+ boxes by the end of the year; not sure of the timescale for the VHD boxes.

It was planned to put TiVo software into the VHD boxes to keep them in service, but this idea has now been scrapped.

You can, but you can only get TV M with a phone line - which at 17.99 per month makes it a more expensive option (More TV with VHD is £15 pm).

Not surprising they decided against putting TiVo software on a box that can only handle a 24 hour EPG!

Correction: It's only the SA V+ boxes that will be withdrawn by the end of the year, not the Samsung V+ boxes.


Good thinking.

Wish they would offer Sky Sports F1 on its own and a lower rate not even sky do that which is shame because if they did it would be 1 reason to ditch virgin, we don't watch the others a great deal and is becoming expensive just for 1 channel.

Depending on how much you value the programmes on non-race weeks, you could get a Now TV box and buy weekly Sky Sports passes on race weeks only, which would be cheaper. 21 races at £10.99 per week = £230.79 per year.
If your happy watching Channel 4 on their 10 live race weekends, the remaining 11 weeks on Sky would cost a total of £120.89 for the year.

Good idea. I have no interest at all in Formula 1 so if it was a separate channel it might make the rest of the package cheaper!

Sky do for customers that had the appropriate package before a certain date. You cannot add that package now, and if you change to a different package you cannot change back.
Ultimately it isn't a decision that is up to Virgin Media, they can just offer what Sky gives them.


Not a chance, sports other than football are used by Sky to subsidise the cost of the football coverage.

Good idea and Now Tv Sports passes can be bought from Argos for £10
http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Produc...er/3142422.htm

I use NOW TV along side Virgin media and as Andyland says it does work out cheaper.

the old idea of buying just a couple of sky sports channels no longer works..
sky sports has increasingly mixed its output across channels and not left them on a dedicated channel (other than sky sports f1 which i thought also was rumoured to be about to be scrapped)... so increasingly people who wanted sky sports 1 only so they could watch one sport specifically found those matches sometimes put on another of the channels...
the "watch anywhere app" and delayed watching shifts also make the "all or nothing" bundle proposition the way forward.

so the change is very logical....
plus if you just want a bit of premier footy, or football, bt sport with its small pack of premier matches augmented with european & fa cup coverage has arguably become the package to opt for if money is tight.

the above thread shows people have fallen for the "i could have just one channel with the sport i like and not have the ones i dont like and it would be cheaper"
that wont and cant happen. the reason is simple.. the content is purchased in an uneven manner.. premiership football for example is a "premium" purchase for them, they are likely to have over paid for it to its "true value" - some other sports will also have been over paid for in order to add to the pack to consumers value & limit competition (the content sellers are not unhappy with that arrangement as those with the most sought after content likely all get more for their product than they would going down another route).. then you have the minor sports that likely get underweight payments for their true value BUT are aware that on their own they are not much of a draw to a "pay as you go" subscriber and are happy taking "less" for the chance to be on the popular supplier and thus have a bigger potential market for their content to offer on to their advertisers on the sport events etc... (and on their own they know they would end up on something like premier that is "less watched" and not an end of the industry there is much interest in creating such channels - they all need some bling to sell the rest of the cheap stuff, just like the £1 stores do by having a few big brands to legitimise the tat.

there are only a few exceptions.. such as f1 (like opera seems to get undue ease in tv contracts possibly because of the "networking club" those tv execs can utilize with the powers that be in key countries and other top industries...) and the racing channel with it's quite unique set up (one sky's racing channel has tried to break) and cricket & rugby union (again there is a board room networking interest in these two)

sports not in the content war between sky & bt tend to be on hardly picked up channels like premier sports (and the lack of tv money shows in things like ice hockey)...
eurosport plays a weird "half interested" / slightly more than specialist audueice sport host (things that get watched more than they might because its on eurosport & eurosport tends to be in general bundled tv packs not add on premium packs - cycling being one that may have jumped out of that spot and into a more mainstream audience via itv4 being interested and sky's european operations being more keen on it obviously... discovery is always rumoured to be thinking about a bigger play in eurosport with a premier league play... but then again so was al jaz (at least before their world expansion plans slipped with the closing of the usa news ops)

but anyone who thinks they are going to get just the specific content they like at a simple "slice price" is ignoring what goes into making the bundles and what the real state of play is to the one the consumer first assumes.