Originally Posted by Chris T

But it's not half a million customers, it's half a million viewers. For statistical purposes, the UK is reckoned to have 2.2 viewers per household (source). VM reaches roughly 3.5 million households, therefore used to provide a potential reach of about 7.7 million viewers to Sky One. Of those 7.7 million, just 500,000 were watching Lost, Sky One's top-rated programme. That is about 6.5% of VM viewers (assuming, of course, that the entire 500,000 drop is due to the loss of Sky One from VM - a reasonable assumption I think).

So Sky has lost 33% of its viewers for Lost, but VM has only pi**ed off 6.5% of its viewers in the process. Now tell me who's out on a limb here.