Talk to me about broadband & NOW TV

[GaryTheCat]

Currently laying a small fortune £69.99 to Virgin Media for phone, broadband and medium TV package. Don’t really make use of the TV package but like recording things.

I see that NOW TV is cheap. Anyone use this? Is it good? I can see this a way of ‘unbundling’ and keeping costs down…

How does moving broadband work?

I’ve been lazy and used Virgin for years and now I need to wise up and pay as little as possible.

Anyone who has done this please talk me through it….

We pay £28 a month for sky fibre optic super fast broadband inc phone line but don't have sky tv.

We have now tv entertainment package on offer for 6 months @£6.99 but normally £9.99

Now TV movies @£5 a month normally around £10 I think and now tv boost at £2 a month normally £5. It means more people can watch at the same time on different devices.

We also have Netflix. We've been paying the premium package as in laws have been using it for years meaning we've had to pay for extra devices to log in however it's now going upto £16 a month so we've gone down to the £10 a month one and they can get their own bloody account.

There's loads on the now tv packages and they're always adding stuff

Altogether we pay £42 for absolutely everything.

We also use sky for broadband and then have Now and Netflix (also have disney+)
Our sky broadband is reliable, so didn't want to rock that as I wfh.

We used NOW for 6/7 years now. Rarely pay the full price per month. As its monthly, you can just cancel, when it comes to cancelling they often give you an offer. We have entertainment for £4.99 a month for 6 months currently. Movies is just ending on an offer at £4.99, Ive just cancelled and they didn't give me an offer, normally after a few days there will be an offer on my account, but occasionally I have to pay one month full price for any of the packages, and then cancel at the end of that month, and get an offer. We get so much more than we got with sky, as a fraction of the cost as sky used to charge for box sets. Because its streaming you do need a good broadband connection,

Can't get Virgin as our road's not cabled. Late DM did have them and was getting some enormous bills for stuff that, essentially, she didn't use.

We use NowTV. As PP said, you do need decent broadband, but the great thing is that you buy it a month at a time and you can mix and match what you want. You just have to be a little careful as they will autorenew at full price at the slightest opportunity. Overall, it's not as good as it used to be because of the proliferation of other services eg they used to have a lot of Disney stuff but now Disney are running Disney+ there's less, and although Sky are increasing their own content it's streets behind Netflix. There's not a lot you can do about that except switch services regularly eg NowTV this month, Netflix next, Disney+ the one after etc.

Any broadband that comes down an Openreach phone line to your house is going to be fundamentally much the same. The differences may lie in things like email, customer servicem etc, Have a look at MoneySavingExpert for the current deals.

If you have been on Virgin for years, then you may have to pay for the installation or reactivation of an Openreach line.

Some places have fibre to the home from new providers like CityFibre or Hyperoptic. These cost more but should be much more robust and reliable than Openreach copper lines.

About a year and a half ago, I swapped from Virgin as we thought something was wrong with our internet speeds and for the price, didn't think it was worth it. Went with NoW. After a few months, I swapped the broadband back to Virgin because Now was even slower and my ds does lots of gaming, he's autistic so it was causing him to have meltdowns with it not working and they needed the internet reliably as were home schooling due to covid. We went back to Virgin for our broadband but kept the Now TV stick for TV as we found the choice was better and cheaper, as a PP explained, you can have Sky for a lot cheaper and tailor it to suit what you watch, we have Entertainment, Movies, and Kids.

We have Virgin Media broadband only, we pay £39pm but we need a fast speed, gamers, streaming and WFH so you could get that down.

We do spend a small fortune in all the TV add ons. Netflix £14, Amazon prime £3.25 (student ac) Disney plus £6.58 (79 annual) Now TV £3.99 (usually 9.99) apart from the annual ones like Amazon and Disney I do regularly cancel the other services and pick them up a couple of months later when they have new releases. Also, I don't pay for a TV licence as I now don't watch live TV or BBC. So saves £15pm.

We used to pay £80pm with VM, I'm sure with price hikes it'd be much higher. I do miss the TiVo box but with catch up app on all the terrestrial channel we can watch everything anyway.

Thanks for this advice. So I found a good deal with Sky so switched to them. Then told Virgin I was leaving and got an even better deal (almost half the price) plus upgrade in broadband speed and TV.

Result!