Quote:
Originally Posted by GuestUK
In one of the news broadcasts with a Sky representative, they mentioned that they did lower the price a few times, as well as offering to throw in extra channels as well as HD content too. It seems like Sky was willing to negotiate to an extent, moreso than it seems Virgin was willing. Virgin walked away from negotiations, not Sky.
Originally they were not letting customers out of contracts. It was only after the NCC raised the issue, hit the news, and commented that the least VM could do was allow customers out of contracts. Then Virgin agreed to do so up until the end of March, possible to avoid losing face and the bad PR that would have arisen otherwise.
As for being upfront, the press releases and the messages gave were rather one sided and had a lot of Virgin spin to them, implying Sky withdrew the channels and Sky left the negotiations, and acting as if they are the victim. While I don't know what happened between them precisely, other than the news reports, Virgin's side doesn't really appear to have much to stand on, other than big bad sky was too expensive, but look at our great video on demand service, it's much better than Sky's rubbish channels!
I personally think there is something rather suspicious about the entire ordeal. The flextech deal (for Virgin's channels) and the Sky deal were set to expire at the same time. That way, they could have done the deals together and made sure they were both fair for each other. Instead, Virgin accepted a very large hit in profits, and asked to postpone the Sky deal for 3 months. Sky agreed, and 3 months later, Virgin refuse to pay for the channels and try to make it look like Sky withdrew them (or maybe Virgin was hoping that Sky would return the favour and take cuts for the Sky channels, so they could lower their prices and keep advertising their whole Sky isnt the cheapest place to get Sky ads). Virgin then complain that Sky didn't pay them enough for their channels and abused their monopoly position. Meanwhile, with all the extra cash saved from not buying the Sky channels, Virgin has been quick to start spending money on more VOD content and things like big brother sponsorship, and they have knocked the competition (Sky One) out of the way to Virgin customers, all the while trying to gain public sypathy and challenging Sky in the courts. Seems it worked out quite conveniently for Virgin, without looking like they did anything wrong.
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No matter what happens everybody loses with this situation.
Virgin would be stupid to generate a problem as Sky One and the other channels are popular and Virgin will lose customers who move to Sky.
Sky really couldn't afford to lose the money from Virgin as now they have to get something like 150,000 Virgin customers to defect to make up the lost revenue.
Sky customers are relatively unaffected though they might not like how Sky operates.
Virgin customers lose the Sky Channels but get Virgin Central on Channel 119 instead. If there were hundreds of programmes to chose from then that wouldn't be so bad but 7 or 8 is not enough. I doubt whether Virgin has enough storage space.
It will be interesting to see what happens when Ofcom investigate. I just hope that Sky and Virgin can come to a deal that's in the best interests of their customers.