Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business...remier-league/

Numbers have fallen as they've taken BT sports out of the main tv pack. This is a cock up of VMs making again.

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

The removal from the top pack was Discovery's request

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

Indeed, Discovery are just paving the way to the low cost streaming future.

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

The trouble is Paramount, Di$covery & Di$ney all pulled their channels from VM, Sky etc, and put them on their own premium platform.

I used to watch NCIS on Fox, but no it was put on Di$ney, and now they are wondering why the viewing figures have dropped.

I once actually worked out how much it would cost if you bough all these premium channels and excluding VM, Sky etc it was about £120 per month

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

Hardly a football blackout, TNT are a small fraction of the premiership games.
Sky have the majority - I dont have TNT at all, and still manage to watch tons of football every week.

Im glad your not affected Paul......

All these stupid disputes dont have to be if the networks werent so bloody greedy!!

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

Paramount+ costs me nothing as I get it free with Sky Movies on Sky.

We pay for TNT Sport but mainly the wife that wanted it. I don't like watching Football on TV. Just not the same as being there.

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

Discovery+ is free too from Sky and BTtv/EEtv. You get the sports channels included if they are in your Sky/BT/EE pack.

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

It's difficult from that article to work out exactly what the arguments are. But, perhaps, Virgin pay a cost per subscriber but subject to a minimum annual fee/collar paid by Virgin built into the terms. So the cost per subsciber would have worked out cheaper when more customers had XL. But now VM are still paying the minimum annual fee to TNT, but with far fewer customers subscribing to the channels?

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

Virgin media never learn from their past mistakes.

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

Tbh I'm not that bothered about the Premiership. It was nice for National League football and Aussie cricket in winter, but I can live without it. Most of these things are free to stream anyway if you know the right places.

However it could be great leverage to get VM bills lowered come contract negotiations. I will of course tell them I'm devastated to lose TNT and mention the SKY word ;) . Worked with the similar UKtv dispute a few years ago, discounts/compensation aplenty.

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

Thats a pretty vague statement, what do you mean exactly ?

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

What are they supposed to do?

Discovery as a content provider want to extract top dollar and are charging Sky customers £25 a month. Wholesaling it to Virgin at any price undermines their own model.

The rationale why Setanta, ESPN and BT at first were keen to wholesale because they’d fledgeling models. Fixed, guaranteed income was helpful.

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

SKY, UKTV but on reflection Jfman does have a very good point in his reply to me too, maybe i was to harsh on vm.

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

Also BT Sports did launch on Virgin - two week later then launch date.

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

It’s probably a fair comment with UKTV and other smaller third party channel disputes.

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

Don't care about the football but TNT sports is a must for the rugby and MotoGP

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

How is it Virgin Media's fault? They were told to take it out of the main tv pack? Turner wanted more money. Now they're getting less.

specialists in failure!

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

Were they? The article suggests otherwise.

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

Ask VM about SKY and UKTV, VM have form for this kind of behaviour.
Don't worry you can watch your RAW on netflix from next year.

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

Sky had a similar issue with Discovery not so long ago.

I suspect it is something that happens more often - but only occasionally goes public.

Re: Virgin Media customers risk football blackout
 

Indeed so, Paul. The Telegraph article cites numerous sports rights contracts, but chooses to use football as the headline.

Ya I assume so....... They dont want public outcry so they end up paying these outragous charges.......