Originally Posted by nialli

Check this post's comments from Neil Berkett:

And also if you look at the (official) Sky Atlantic Twitter feed you'll see a few comments to substantiate that talks are taking place.
What Stuart Murphy has talked about was Sky Atlantic differentiating between pay TV and Freeview/Freesat, which is Sky's bigger rival (and the biggest digital platform of them all of course). Sky want people to pay for their channels and advertisers to have sufficient reach - Virgin Media is part of their strategy for Sky Atlantic I'm sure. The exclusivity is a short-term tactic to get as much as it can out of VM for carriage, maximise the benefit of the Sky Atlantic HD launch marketing, and maybe spoil a little VM's TiVo marketing.