My, we're touchy this evening aren't we. Odd how you can dish out barbed comments and then get all hot under the collar when you get them back. If you can't stand the heat ...
You have an extremely shaky grasp of statistics and a still shakier grasp of the realities of TV channel penetration in the UK.
Sky is in more than 10 million homes. VM is in about 4 million. Between them, they make the vast majority of pay-TV channels available to 14 million homes, or more than 50% of all British households.
If Sky One, to take the most popular pay-TV entertainment channel as an example, was performing as well even as Channel 5 (the least popular public service channel) then you would expect its reach to be about 2%, making an allowance for the fact that about half as many homes can get Sky One as can get C5. But Sky One only gets half that. Its tiny reach has nothing to do with the fact that it's a subscription channel and everything to do with it being a niche product.
And that brings me back to my point. Sky's channels are not mass-market products. They are niche products. As you correctly point out, on-demand/catch-up viewing is of growing importance and Virgin Media's long-term strategy is to develop an on-demand platform that serves up the meat you can get from those niche channels without also carrying the gristle (of which there is much).
However to suggest, as you did, that BARB's figures are suspect because of the availability of services like Sky Go is just naive.