Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/broadcas...r-gbp339m.html[COLOR="Silver"]

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Or from the horse's mouth
http://investors.virginmedia.com/Sto...tion-2186.aspx

Not mentioned there, but VM also get Eden HD, Good Food HD, Dave HD, Watch HD and Alibi HD (once they launch) as part of the deal.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Lets hope we do not have to wait too long for these HD channels and VOD content.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Well I don't know about them all but Alibi HD isn't due to launch till next year I think.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Now if the Gardening channel returns, I'll be happy, but in the meantime this long strung out distraction for VM is finally at an end.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Another great deal for Virginmedia (the sale of living and getting the sky channels being the other) an the gap between Sky and virgin is narrowing all the time.

Now I think Sky is going to have to start justifying the £10.25 HD charge. It was kind of ok 2 years ago but now Virginmedia have really caught up and give there customers HD and ESPN inclusive on the top package.

I would say the TV services are now equal as although sky has more channels most of it is fluff. VM now have 85% of all the quality channels and there HD versions.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

So now VM have received a big fat wad of cash, perhaps they can give their viewers what they want and invest in Sky Atlantic!

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Yes the sooner we get that channel the better

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

I disagree, vm can't give in to sky's redicioulous demands, what's to stop them creating another channel and charge a fortune again!

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

But we do not know whether it is Sky's fault or Virgin's fault do we

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Exactly, Denphone, Sky are in the wrong because Mr Berkett says so? Sorry, I don't accept that. I really wish some people would get out of the mindset that VM are some kind of hero fighting against the tyrannical Sky empire!!

If Sky create another channel then put the Sky Atlantic programmes on that then I'm sure VM would have good grounds to go to ofcom about it.

If Sky are putting a deliberately unrealistic price on SKy Atlantic at the moment, why haven't VM complained about it?

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

What are ofcom going to do? Sky are not obligated to give virgin this channel for a reasonable cost

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Ofcom were able to order Sky to drop their sports price and reported Sky to the competition commission re movies, why not regarding TV content?

Also, who says Sky aren't offering it at a reasonable price? Sky think they are, VM think they aren't - why should we believe one company over the other.

Bottom line is, VM have got a good wad of cash for selling channels (again) surely it is no bad thing to invest in quality content?

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Yes its definitely time they invested in more channels

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

sky have a history of witholding channels so it a fair guess who fault it is and they made it clear from the start and before it launched it was a sky exclusive so they had no intention of letting vm have it maybe after they change there packs in september they might let vm get it we have to wait and see i guess

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

While I agree with you , can you blame Sky they have pumped billions into their channels over the years so a period of exclusivity seems reasonable. Let's not forget when Sky started out they took massive risks , VM had their own channels and had developed Living HD into quite a decent one hence why Sky bought them. VM took the option to be just a platform rather than a broadcaster they had the chance to develop a good channel range but instead sold up , some think this was right others don't.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

You show great loyalty to your master today MM and the force is strong with you.:D

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

My worry now Den is with UKTV stake sold and VMTV channels sold their future bargaining power is seriously diminished :(

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

You are probably right MM but if it was me l would have never sold the channels to Sky or done this deal but there again what do l know.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Although that £339M + £160M might come in handy when negotiating :D

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Lets hope so

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

True James and a fair point. :D

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

then we would even have less channels than we do now sky premium hd or sky sports red button didnt you want that too only way we ever were going to get it was vm to sell sky the channels aint you complaining we should get more channels so dont see how your against vm selling there channels when we have even less than now so im glad they sold the channels as we get more channels and red button

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

A valid point Dave it is a hard one to call you can see the pros and cons for both.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

It's a risk VM are taking, but the end result should be more content and that's what everyone keeps going on about. :)

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

yes and remember when everyone was moaning about us getting sky premuim hd and red button now we got both :)

ps any word on red button for tivo yet DF

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

And l gather that flood of content will come soon DF

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Yes, just waiting for final clearance of the deal with the relevant bods.

---------- Post added at 17:28 ---------- Previous post was at 17:26 ----------

Nothing yet, Dave.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

You will make a fine politician DF:D;):D

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

I'm not DF, but it's in development at the moment.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

:D you are SP ;)

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Have you got a timespan on that

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Nope :)

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Its not a risk though is it, a lot of regular posters on this forum are absolutely obsessed with Sky and Sky's content. To the point that if you say sky tv is ok someone will ask something completely uneducated and insane like "Has your master paid you today"

Virginmedia is now a platform not a content provider so it needs to understand where its strengths are. Its 4 million TV customers give it leverage and it also needs to make its customers understand VM is not sky.

There are 100's of content providers worldwide who will be happy to do deals with VM when they realise the 4 million customers waiting too watch the content.

Surely if you sell your channel to sky you may have a possible 10 million customers but you're up against channels like Sky Atlantic. But on VM you don't have that issue. Turn negatives into positives and get different exclusive content an stop chasing skys tail.

I'm sure VM has a team of people selling its advantages like VOD in HD and Tivo etc. But its customers need to forget about Sky and Skys content.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

What he said.

Also bear in mind that despite Sky channels being available in more than half the homes in the UK, their top-rated entertainment channel - Sky One - still only has an average viewing share of about 1% and struggles to screen anything that garners more than 1 million viewers. Sky Atlantic's share (still available in more than 10 million homes) is well under half of one percent. Sky's TV channels simply aren't all that special in the minds of the vast majority of British TV viewers, even those viewers that have access to those channels. That anybody would think otherwise says lots for the skill of Sky's marketing department. But at the end of the day, it's all gloss and very little substance.

On top of that there is nothing to suggest that people with Virgin Media TV aren't watching broadly the same stuff as everyone else, namely big-name shows on the big-name public service channels, with a little of 'all the rest' thrown in when there's nothing else worth watching.

VM's strength lies not in what linear channels it has available, but in how it can deliver content to its customers. That's where the company's focus has been for quite some time now, and today's announcement is simply another path along that road.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

I'm afraid Chris your living in the dark ages here , them figures merely represent how many watched say Hawaii Five O on its Sunday night premiere airing, what about people who watch it when repeated or VIA Sky Anytime/Anytime+ or Sky Go online.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

So people want VM to pay the price that they won't pay by subscribing to Sky..If you want Sky Atlantic so much subscribe to Sky for goodness sake.:rolleyes:

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Muppetman I'm affriad it is you who has it wrong. Shows with good veiwing figures are availible for all to see. To many Sky shows have very poor figures.

You can't start saying the reason sky has crap viewing figures is because everyone time shifts. Surely 1 or 2 shows would have big figures?

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

l would pay more to have more channels Maggy and l have no intention of going to Sky for it

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

If you believe that (legal) catch-up services bolster the reach of any of Sky's content by more than 10-15% then you're living in cloud cuckoo land.

The most popular non-soap drama in the UK (Doctor Who) manages a time-shift that adds at most 1.5 million to an overnight of about 6 million, and that's considered to be a massive amount. To believe Sky to be achieving anything like it is self-delusion on a grand scale.

Don't deceive yourself by hanging round the sort of forums where lots of Sky content fans hang out. This forum, and others, are what you would call a self-selecting sample and are not representative of the nation's viewing habits as a whole.

Most households view broadly the same set of linear programming on the same set of channels, regardless of the platform they use. Your point about catch-up methods serves admirably to prove the suggestion that VM is correct to concentrate on its delivery, rather than its linear content, and it really does not prove that VM should be chasing after more Sky-branded channels at any cost.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

I never stated any amounts, if you care to read my post back nor was I suggesting Sky's most popular shows rivalled terrestrial viewing which seems ludicrous to even suggest considering their are far more people with access to them , I don't hang around any forums nor delude myself to Sky's content reach, was merely stating the viewing figures aren't accurate on overnights now , maybe you should try reading properly and cut the personal insults. Can you also point out were I suggested that VM should pay ridiculous amounts to acquire Sky content ?

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

My, we're touchy this evening aren't we. Odd how you can dish out barbed comments and then get all hot under the collar when you get them back. If you can't stand the heat ... ;)

You have an extremely shaky grasp of statistics and a still shakier grasp of the realities of TV channel penetration in the UK.

Sky is in more than 10 million homes. VM is in about 4 million. Between them, they make the vast majority of pay-TV channels available to 14 million homes, or more than 50% of all British households.

If Sky One, to take the most popular pay-TV entertainment channel as an example, was performing as well even as Channel 5 (the least popular public service channel) then you would expect its reach to be about 2%, making an allowance for the fact that about half as many homes can get Sky One as can get C5. But Sky One only gets half that. Its tiny reach has nothing to do with the fact that it's a subscription channel and everything to do with it being a niche product.

And that brings me back to my point. Sky's channels are not mass-market products. They are niche products. As you correctly point out, on-demand/catch-up viewing is of growing importance and Virgin Media's long-term strategy is to develop an on-demand platform that serves up the meat you can get from those niche channels without also carrying the gristle (of which there is much).

However to suggest, as you did, that BARB's figures are suspect because of the availability of services like Sky Go is just naive.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

No offence but I haven't said they are mass market , nor have I stated they will have the reach of terrestrial TV , I merely stated the overnights aren't accurate anymore which remains a FACT.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

The overnights are as accurate as they ever were. They tell you how many people watched any given programme as it was broadcast.

The consolidated figures, which are the ones you get from the public part of the BARB website, are the ones that claim to allow for time-shifting, and I suspect what you actually mean is that the consolidated figures are more questionable because they can't yet measure online catch-up, only catch-up via TV.

There may be some truth in that, however, the BBC does from time to time release general, aggregated stats for the iPlayer and while it's not often possible to see how a specific programme has been accessed, it is definitely possible to say that while iPlayer is impressive, its not generating the sorts of figures that would justify the claim that BARB's figures "aren't accurate anymore which remains a FACT".

It's not a fact, even if you put it in caps.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Thanks for educating me ;)

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

How you do define Sky having market share over TV content?

Sports? Yeah. Movies? Yeah. TV content? :confused:

---------- Post added at 20:50 ---------- Previous post was at 20:44 ----------

Without the sale of VMTV, VM wouldn't have any Sky HD channels, Sky VOD content or I suspect, Sky Sports Red button.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Looks like a good deal for Virgin.

If this means more HD channels, and more on demand content, then I'm a pretty happy customer.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

The deal has nothing to do with content. The new HD channels were coming anyway.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Denphone i read an article through a link on here in which a top sky executive stated "sky atlantic will not appear on virgin nedia anytime soon"

They wanted a period of exclusivity for their own subs as they advertised it as added for free,so although they offered it i suspect it was offered at a price virgin could and indeed should have refused.

Once it goes into skys paid for packs they may be more willing to negotiate methinks.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

I think the XL TV package should be free for those who take Talk Unlimited and either 50MB or 100MB Broadband.

No other company will be able to offer that internet speed combined with that amount of TV channels at no extra cost including HD channels, the only fees these particular customers should pay is the Tivo fee,multiroom fee,pay-per-view movies,pay-per-view events and premium channels.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Interesting marketing ploy for sure personally i doubt wether the talk unlimited price would fund all the XL tv content on its own,but if the deal was take talk unlimited and either 50MB or 100MB Broadband and get TV XL for free then that would sound very realistic to me.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

They wanna try getting there lower speeds working properly first , and sorting the Superhub out.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Seems too much too give away free. I'd say increasing the loyalty discount by X amount per year would be sensible, up to a point of course. It would give incentive for people to stay and would essentially negate price rises that new(er) customers would receive.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

A fine idea apart from that this kind of package would struggle to make Virgin a reasonable profit.

The 100Mb tier is quite subsidised enough in terms of the load on the network the customers using it create without throwing loads of paid for TV, as in VM pay for each customer receiving it, for free at them.

Re: Virgin Media sells UKTV stake to Scripps for £339m
 

Scripps Networks Interactive and Virgin Media Complete UKTV Transaction

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/scr...ion-2011-10-03