Posts Tagged virgin
Virgin Digital folds
Seasoned readers may remember my brief love affair with the Virgin Digital music download service, a love affair that ended when any semblence of working service disappeared for 3 weeks, then shortly after returning the entire system was ‘redesigned’ and stopped working entirely, then the bitch changed all the locks on the house and stepped on my blue suede shoes (OK, I made those last 2 bits up). Later in the year Virgin merged with serial fraudsters ntl, and I made resolute my decision to never give Virgin another penny.
With that in mind, imagine my glee when I got this email today
Another week, another Virgin Digital screwup
Last week Virgin Digital made a private apology via email to all of their subscribers and promised everything would be working by Wednesday (10th). I for one was not the least bit surprised when Wednesday came and went only for the long-standing error message I had been receiving (“Unable to retrieve download url”) to be replaced with a new one: Machine can not be activated for dwnld/dwnld lic
Virgin Digital problems – the new site still doesn’t work
Two weeks ago I talked about the numerous and serious problems with the new Virgin Digital website which forced it to be shut down over Christmas. Since then it has reopened, having had the frequent server crashes fixed, but here’s the catch – everything else is still broken.
The new Virgin Digital service – An inauspicious start
It seems like I have more bad to say about Virgin Digital than good recently. I still have no doubt that they are the best UK service available at the moment, but right now that honour only falls to them by virtue of the others being that little bit worse.
Recently Virgin moved the bulk of their service (everything except the subscription service) to a browser based system instead of the dedicated player software they used before. They then seemingly abandoned what was left of the old client to work on the new one, and it stopped working once IE7 was launched. After (presumably) enough customers complained, they then U-turned and fixed it. One thing I did spot is that even after it was fixed, they quietly stopped updating the media guide, so to the casual observer it looked like no music had been released for over a month, though recent releases were fully available if you knew what to search for.
On Friday, they finally launched the subscription system on the new website. I say finally not only because it should have launched when the rest of the site launched, but also because they sent out emails announcing that it was live, then suddenly realised it wasn’t live and took the site down for 3 hours to update it. When it came back up, I took a good look over the new system and I’m sorry to report the results were less than satisfying. Roughly 10% of the times that I clicked on a click I got a server error, and when I did get to see the site I wasn’t that impressed.
Things only got worse from there. Right now, this is all you get when visiting:
Guys, this is why you don’t launch a new system on a Friday before a major international holiday. Note also that ‘circumstances’ is spelled incorrectly, such is the rush they are in.
So, what can we expect when it returns? And why has it been taken completely offline?
As if by magic, Virgin Digital returns!
No sooner do I mope about missing my Virgin Digital subscription, than it returns! After getting very frustrated yesterday with the lack of decent alternatives while Virgin was offline, I got an email this morning letting me know that a fixed version was ready and that all I had to do was launch the program and let the auto-update kick in.
Well, the auto-update didn’t work as it failed to find the update file on the server – obviously still a few glitches to iron out – but with the aid of Wireshark, the Google cache, and some expert sleuthing, I was able to work out where they were keeping the full installer for the new version. Installed it, and everything is working again! Fantastic. I foresee a lot of music downloading this evening.
After trying to use the HMV software for just a few days, going back to Virgin was like an old friend returning from a long absence.
The Jay, he is happy again.
