Man in a Shed: NTL

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Virgin media pull the plug on Sky 1

This has been in the UK media for a while. Virgin media and Sky have been having a row over paying to run Sky's basic channels via the UK cable system.

In short Virgin media may have had a point on Sky asking for too much - however Sky one was one of the main reasons for having cable, which is otherwise an expensive way of getting most of what Freeview gives you anyway.

I was half way though the latest 24 season and Battlestar Galatica ( don't snigger - its great stuff, sort of Star Wars and the West Wing combined ). Now I'll have to wait for the boxed sets.

So I'm not a happy bunny. I pay Virgin Media about GBP 180/year for the cable ( removing telephone replacement cost at BT basic rate ). I'm pushed to see what I get for it now.... which means it may be time for me to pull the plug on Virgin.

Update: A summary of the dispute is available by Tom Douglas over at the BBC (whom may be excused for enjoying all this ) here ..

Tag Virgin+Media, Sky

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman