[steveh]

The rise of IPTV services is an issue for Sky too. The new companies can move faster than the incumbents, they have better designed, smarter and easier to use applications, they're buying up content that would have traditionally gone to pay TV and (for now at least) they're at a significantly lower price point designed to attract new customers. Sky have anticipated this with Now TV, but Virgin have yet to do anything - instead they're pushing up their prices to even higher levels.

Virgin have the advantage of their own wired network, deals with many content providers and an insight into the viewing habits of their customers which could enable them to provide a truly smart box that tailored your viewing to the content from all the services and content providers they work with. Maybe they have something to launch in the autumn, but increasingly it seems like they're just happy to milk the base and that the innovation that happened around the time they first became Virgin Media was a one-off thing.