News Anyone with Virgin Media?

[Bob007]

Not every torrent is illegal tho.

Public Domain Torrents(google it, some great stuff) uses bt to spread movies/shows that are public domain, Little Shop of Horrors, Night of the Living Dead, both classics (my opinion), both public domain and both given a new lease of life to new posible viewers by the use of the p2p torrent system.

Blizzard use the bt system to spread patches for World of Warcraft.

Warner, Fox, Sega, Paramount (to name a few) are all testing bt based services.

NTL seem to be renting out http/https access and not internet access. As the old say goes. Theres more to the internet then the world wide wait. (pre broadband days )

Also throttling 1 service (bt) and offering customers free access to alt.bins usenet content seems a bit errrrr two faced (?) to me.

 

[nath]

If lossless, DRM-free music, and HD video downloads were available as paid services, with no packet shaping, no speed restrictions, and prices below their physical media equivalents, would you buy them?

Well it's a slight sidestep but I'm using GOG.com and gladly paying for content that I could pretty easily get free. I also paid for that new Prince of Persia game despite (actually because of) the fact that it had no copy protection. If a company treats its customers with a bit of respect then I'll happily support them. I suspect I'm in the minority though.

 

[chipper]

im having a terrible time with GTA IV atm, frankly ill not buy another rockstar game after this. its shit like this why alot of ppl turn to piracy, in gaming anyway. you try and do the right thing and support them and they fuck you in return, support is almost non exsistant

 

[Tom]

Well it's a slight sidestep but I'm using GOG.com and gladly paying for content that I could pretty easily get free. I also paid for that new Prince of Persia game despite (actually because of) the fact that it had no copy protection. If a company treats its customers with a bit of respect then I'll happily support them. I suspect I'm in the minority though.

I'll join you in that minority. I bought Darwinia, Defcon, and World of Goo - all really nice cheap games, simple, and no busybody copy protection. I'll buy pretty much anything that Valve write through Steam.

I've said for a while now that when the film studios allow me to sit at my telly and press a button to watch a brand new film, I won't download anything any more. I will not pay £6 to sit in a cinema with kids messing around and people making phone calls, watching a film with the volume too loud that I can't pause when I go to the loo. And I'm not buying DVDs any more either, because I don't want to have to buy them again on whatever new format comes along in ten years time. Oh and stop mastering compact discs with too much compression and distortion please, you stupid twats.

You know what we need - a pay on demand service with about a million titles to choose from. A reasonable price (not £4 for a 5 year old film please Virgin and stop fucking cropping 2.35:1 films to 16:9 ffs) would help.

 

[Raven]

im having a terrible time with GTA IV atm, frankly ill not buy another rockstar game after this. its shit like this why alot of ppl turn to piracy, in gaming anyway. you try and do the right thing and support them and they fuck you in return, support is almost non exsistant

Yep, even though I have bought it I am torrenting it because the DRM is SO intrusive its a joke. I don't want to use windows live and I don't want to use the social club bollocks, yet I have to just to play the game! even on steam.

 

[bob269]

I've only skimped thru some of the posts but agree with Tom on the pay for 24/7 - 20meg thats what you should be getting however i know that 5%-10% of virgins customers hog 90% of the bandwidth, Now this can be certainly argued that those 90% customers are paying over the odds and barely using it thus subsidising the hoggers.

Traffic shaping is to be upped on the 50meg service to around 10gig per 5hrs i think, but yeah they will need to change and adapt. They still quote "well 50meg will get you a million mp3s in 10mins etc.", they neglect to think that people now use the net for iplayer, itv/channel4/5 online, xbox360/ps3 downloads + hd download movies.

If you're a pirate and bothered about hitting such high d/l limits then download thru the night. As for torrents it's full of pron and viruses and really it's used only by those who get told about them from work mates.

As for Virgin/NTL/C&W i've been with them from the start, only a handful of down days in all those years, i've never needed to phone support (apart from when the cable was cut thru during gardening and they sorted it at their expense pretty quickly), as for pricing i rang them 6months ago to threaten to cancel and got 20meg for 20quid + free setanta package on my basic tv.

 

[bob269]

You know what we need - a pay on demand service with about a million titles to choose from. A reasonable price (not £4 for a 5 year old film please Virgin and stop fucking cropping 2.35:1 films to 16:9 ffs) would help.

MS are trying this but it doesnt look like we'll get the netflix deal due to various restrictions.

The 360 US has downloadable HD for:-

Wall-E
Tropic Thunder
The Dark Knight
Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (Unrated)
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Shrooms
Get Smart
The Strip Game
The Strangers
The Love Guru

Plus a 1000 or so more growing daily, i guess we'll catchup eventually.

 

[bob269]

Just checked my xbox, we also have titles such as Dark Knight for rental

 

[rynnor]

You know what we need - a pay on demand service with about a million titles to choose from. A reasonable price (not £4 for a 5 year old film please Virgin and stop fucking cropping 2.35:1 films to 16:9 ffs) would help.

Hah - yeah you know somethings wrong when its cheaper to buy the physical media and get it delivered than to watch the same film once via VM.

Personally I think a decent regulator is required to sort out the ISPs - all existing nonsense about 10mbit connections should be binned and all quoted speeds should only be allowed to describe average speeds customers actually experience at their end.

All adverts should also have to mention the contention ratio - this would give consumers a chance to make an informed choice not the current crapshoot!

 

[Talivar]

Just offer tv channels that show all the good US/UK tv series with replays without adverts later the same day, and show these programs at the SAME time as america and remove the stupid delay between US and UK cinema release dates and you would cut piracy by a massive %