We recently reviewed the Virgin Media V Plus box.

First off, hats off to the many-headed Virgin monster forboldly taking on Sky's HD PVR set-top box media thingy with one of its own.

And it's quite good too. Plenty of storage, enough TV tuners for even the most schizophrenic of couch potatoes, and all that nifty on-demand content. In short, our 4-star verdict seems just about right.

But of course, you're not just buying the box. You're buying into the content and the service too. And it is here that the plot thickens. I should know - I'm a Virgin subscriber.

Or at least I am now, and therein lies problem number one. Because until recently I was a Telewest subscriber, before Mr Branson and co herded me and my fellow subscribers into the happy Virgin family. Go further back and we'd be talking about NTL too, as well as internet provider Blueyonder.

So what we have now is one shiny new service which is actually a cobbled-together motley mess of hand-me-downs.

The company is spending a fortune on an advertising war in an attempt to steal customers from Sky, without noticing the steady stream of itsown existing subscribers heading the other way because of poor service.

It seems any problems inherited from the bad old days of Telewest are handled with the broadcasting equivalent of duct tape and cableties.

Forums and community boards are filled with complaints fromex-Telewest subscribers about being given short shrift by the new Virgin colossus. That's not a criticism of call centre operators, by the way.

There are few more thankless jobs in this world, and I pity anyone having to deal with the sheer weight of complaints that the Virgin customer service line must have handled over recent months.

Then there's the content. Each to their own, of course, but to my mind you're getting little more than Freeview with benefits.

And even the benefits have caveats. With three tuners and160GB of storage, the Replay function is a lot less necessary than it firstseems, while Virgin is hardly going to have a monopoly when it comes to movieson demand.

And the 'extensive library' of archive content is fine aslong as you're happy watching the last eight episodes of certain series', rather than the whole thing.

I can't help but glance over at the seemingly calm waters of the Sky fraternity and wonder quite what I'm doing. Virgin may end up having the superior product in time to come (or maybe BT will trump them both). Whatever happens, I suspect by then I'll have left my Virgin days behind.