The Virgin Media Television thread

Looked like a bit of a pain on first sight but once you have the app on phone or tablet it's fairly painless. App looks good, the addition of 4 is positive, do many watch it. The improvements in the RTEplayer and VMplay show the importance and future for broadcasters of streaming, every programme announcement has "and the *** player".

At around 0.7% share, the channel has little costs. The only channel not making a profit is VMTV1, both 2 (Channel 6 ltd) and 3 (Cullen ltd) both make profit. VMTV is doing very well tbh.

Pretty much, also from what I can gather the VMTV2 live sports coverage is fairly basic. Though I wonder if Live Sports rights comes from VMTV one (TV3 Network Ireland Ltd) and not Channel 6 Ltd. Would be interesting to know if they will ever fully merge? I haven't seen it happen.

Virgin Media 4 just contains repeats of whats been shown a few days earlier on the other channels. Like the other channels they have - it has no clear identity.

Virgin Media More's daytime schedule is now the same "classic" Six Nations and old Messi matches on loop for the past year or so. The viewers for that channel must be in the hundreds.

VM More doesn’t show any advertising. It does show some extra live sport and some dramas before they reach other VM channels. Other then that it’s wall to wall repeats.

They could do a better job of promoting the content on VM More when it is new dramas or premiere of foreign imports.
I get the weekly 'Play' email and most of the time the focus is on streaming content from Netflix etc you need to sub for.

It's a mix, some of them are ITV dramas, some of it ITV co-productions (eg Murder in Provence) which first aired on streamers elsewhere, some Australian stuff, and some French.
Main point really is that if it's the first run of a series on VM whether VM More or VM1 they should be advertising them more prominently - instead of focusing on a Netflix series (eg Sirens). Anybody with VM has VM More but not ITV.

VM More did show all the episodes of Snowpiercer (Prod company including ITV studios) every weekday at 9pm for the past few weeks which was something at least.

They do show programmes soon after they drop on ITVX. It's maybe some sort of agreement they have, in that they can't show on VM1,2,3,4 unless it's been shown on ITV1-4 first perhaps - but VM More is ok showing it.

They weirdly showed the first 2 episodes of Fear The Walking Dead soon after launched in July 2022, but never returned. That's quite odd.

They still might be better off removing the the very few classic sports bits because they've shown Man Utd v Benfica from the 1968 final nearly 200 times now. And just focus on those 3-4 hours and make them feel quality or supreme.

Emmerdale and Coronation Street won’t move to their new slots till January so Virgin Media have a bit of time to decide what to do. I suspect when the time comes they will go for the least imaginative replacement option possible.