[ian1969uk]

Emailed a complaint and this is their response:

Thanks for your comments about advertising appearing in and around our music on demand content. I am obviously saddened to hear that you, a valued customer of Virgin Media, disapprove of what we are doing in this area.

Perhaps it would help if I gave you some context to the decision we made to deploy advertising within on demand in the first place? As you know, Virgin Media has an unparalleled choice, range and depth of on demand content, ranging from catch up services from all of the terrestrial broadcasters through to a comprehensive library of music videos, and unfortunately the acquisition costs associated with such premium content have risen substantially over the last few years.

In response to the increasing costs of content, we recently decided to introduce a carefully controlled amount of advertising into the various on demand content genres featured on the Virgin Media service. With the views and opinions of paying customers like yourself uppermost in mind at all times, we will continue to keep downward pressure on the advertising levels deployed wherever possible. As an illustration of this point we are running a single advert before music videos and substantially less advertising around TV type on demand programming than that seen during the equivalent conventional "live" broadcast airing, and of course will continue to enable our customers to fast forward through advertising should they so desire.

On balance we believe that the on demand service that we offer, including a controlled amount of advertising, continues to offer fantastic value to our customers.

I do hope that this helps.

Thanks and regards,

Cindy