Virgin TV
 |
|
| Type | Pay TV |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Availability | Cable television |
| Founded | March 2006 (February 2007 as Virgin TV) |
| Slogan | "An Exciting Place to Live" |
|
Broadcast area
|
United Kingdom |
| Owner | Liberty Global |
| Parent | Virgin Media |
|
Official website
|
Official site |
Virgin TV is a digital and analogue cable television service in the UK, owned by Liberty Global. Its origins date from NTL and Telewest, two of the largest cable operators in the country which merged on 6 March 2007. All services (including TV) were rebranded under the Virgin name in February 2007. Virgin TV is the largest cable television provider in the country.
Virgin TV ranks as the UK's second largest pay TV service. In 2007, it had 3.6m subscribers, compared to BSkyB's 8.2m on Sky, as of Q3 2007. Virgin's digital cable television currently uses the Nagravision 3 conditional access system.
Currently[update] 55% of UK households potentially have access to Virgin's network, while anyone in the UK with a line-of-sight view of the Astra & Eurobird satellites at 28.2° east has the ability to receive Sky's service.
All television signals broadcast in digital except for Milton Keynes, which remained analogue-only until the end of 2013, at which point the network was shutdown due to a contractual breakdown with BT, the owners of the network in Milton Keynes. It is unclear what will happen to this legacy network.
As of 2008, Virgin Media functioned as a single company; however, it relied on its three existing infrastructures: the Langley-based NTL, Bromley-based Cable and Wireless and Knowsley-based Telewest platforms. As part of the Next Generation Television network, the infrastructure was consolidated into a single super headend at Langley in 2010, with Knowsley serving as a backup.
In May 2008, Virgin Media began their "long term" region-by-region analogue television service switch off project, beginning with Coventry and Glasgow. In areas where analogue transmission will be turned off but no digital replacement introduced customers will be offered Virgin's off-network services, with the company looking at developing a television-over-DSL service for areas outside its cable network. Analogue subscribers in areas where digital cable services are already available will be offered transfers to new packages. The firm signalled that it wants to use the capacity to provide faster broadband internet.
...
Wikipedia