I'm with Virgin Media. I recently accepted a deal which involved adding Sky Cinema to my package (among other things), so I can now record lots of HD movies from Sky
.
Thing is though, if I were to drop Sky Cinema from my package, I'll still have all the recordings, but I wouldn't be able to watch them, even though I still have a Virgin Media package. It's for checks such as this that the broadband link is required.
Cliff