As I know their are thousands of customers in Wigan I can tell you Virgin Media will soon be getting Sky Sports HD 1 & Sky Sports HD 2 available to them. No date yet but I'd assume this will be in time for the next football season. Virgin have yet to say whether they will be available at extra cost. If movies is your boat all the Sky Movies HD Channels will also come to cable.

Hasn't sky just bought Virgin tv?

No. Sky have bought Virgins group of TV Channels not the actual cable company. Basically channels like Virgin 1, Bravo, Challenge and Living now belong to Sky. Virgin 1 will be rebranded.

According to the Sky press release the HD channels will be available for an extra incremental cost.

Well they charge £10 extra on Sky for the HD channels but you get them all even if you don't subscribe to the particular pack the Standard Def versions belong to.

Thats sounds like Virgin will be paying more for the channels to me though. I'd guess it'd be up to Virgin to whether they offer them free or charge. I don't have cable so I've no clue what kind of current deal you have.

For Virgin you get all the current HD channels free at the minute. Espn HD is free, but I imagine that as sky like to screw with virgin they'll have to charge extra for sky sports HD.

Sky will probably do that by making Sky Sports HD 1 & 2 available to cable but then start putting alot more premium sport on HD 3 & 4. It's an old tactic, they used to put a lot of things (like the non premier league football) on Sky Sports Xtra when that channel wasn't on cable.

red button next please!

I didn't know that! So If I just pay the £10 fee for HD, I would get Sports 1 and 2 HD and the HD movie channels. Even though I don't subscribe to the Sports and Movies packages, and just have the entertainment, music and documentary package?

On sky? No you would have to have already subscribed to either the Sports or Movies packages. I was refering to all the basic channel packages not the premium channels.