Virgin Media Threaten to Sue BSkyB
The latest news in the ongoing Virgin Media (formerly known as NTL/Telewest) dispute with Sky is that Virgin have threatened Sky with legal action if this issue is not resolved within 30 days. Virgin believe that the market power of Sky means that they can use their channels to unfairly push their satellite service ahead of their rivals.
Ultimately the courts would have to decide if the dominance of Sky gave it unfair power when dealing with competitors. Personally I don’t see it going that far but if it does the most likely outcome would be the prices of these channels would be put on a standardised rate card that is controlled by the regulators. Some people are suggestion Sky could/should be split up into content and broadcasting divisions but I doubt such drastic action would occur unless Sky in the future behaves in other manners that would show it to be anti-competitive.
What’s amusing at the moment is the Sky advertising on Virgin Radio, Sky have had a long running history with their breakfast show dating from well before NTL got involved with Virgin Mobile to form Virgin Media. Virgin Radio has nor been connected to Richard Branson for many years (despite retaining the brand) but it does seem somewhat amusing hearing a Virgin branded radio show running regular Sky promotions and in the ad breaks mentioning that Virgin Media had dropped Sky One and the URL to visit to switch to Sky.
Virgin Media need to make their sales info more easily accessible. It lives at allyours.virginmedia.com while www.virginmedia.com takes you to some portal probably geared up for their ISP customers. Make the obvious URL the one with the sales info so people can find out about and sign up for your service easily. No one is going to guess the allyours domain, instead they’ll hit www.virginmedia.com and be faced with the portal, they then have to find the product info and sign up links mixed among things like todays news, sport, banner ads , competitions, etc. At least those going to the old Telewest and NTL URLs will get redirected to the products homepage so those that remember the old names will have a quicker job of signing up than those who know of the rebrand.
Although nearly all the cable companies in the UK are owned by Virgin Media a few areas escaped the mergers that finally brought most of the cable companies into one. Wight Cable, which serves the Isle of Wight, still offers the packages that include Sky One. Also in Ireland there’s NTL Ireland that although uses NTL’s old branding is no longer affiliated with what’s now known as Virgin Media so it can carry on offering this Sky basics package.