The Place of James Pain

I’m genuinely annoyed, very annoyed.

We’ve had Virgin Media for about a year. We only got it because Satanta Sports was broadcasting the golf instead of Sky Sports that year. Since it was only costing us an extra £1 a month with our other Virgin Media products, we’d thought we would keep it since it had on demand content that I was fond of.

Infact the full story is that back in the 90’s, we were picked by BT to trial this new on demand technology. We had a physical catalogue book with all the tv shows we could watch, each with a number. We key in that number on our digital box and like magic, there was the show.
Since the trail ended, I’ve always said that when that comes out mainstream, we’re getting it, no questions.
The Virgin on demand service came out around the same time as the iPlayer and other such miracles so I wasn’t too pushy to get it although I clearly wished for it to be in our household.

So we kept Virgin TV after the golf season was over. I enjoyed it greatly, mainly because of the increased quality and not having to set a programme to record if we wanted to watch it. It would just be there, on demand, ready and waiting. The reduced delay was also a slight gain on news channels.

I’ve always tried to get my parents to realise the advantages of using Virgin Media TV with or even instead of Sky+. However, they avoided Virgin like the plague, even despised it. Saying that they “just don’t like it. I just don’t, I like Sky much more.”

During the Big Brother season that they were addicted to, they would sometimes forget to record some episodes. I pointed them to Virgin and how it’s ready to watch on demand. They still refused to even touch the remote controller.

I stopped trying after getting irritated at how there is no logical reason not to use it, since I found it impossible to hate a service that gives you what you want.

This very evening, I took a break from my work and went downstairs to hang out with the family in the lounge. They were watching the Jonathan Ross show which I found unusual since they don’t usually watch this. They reply: “It’s great James, I’m watching this on demand on virgin. It’s got all the BBC programs and such. It’s even much better quality.”

I got quite irritated but thankfully didn’t express it to its full extent in-front of them. Instead I went back to my computer and wrote this.