It's partly my analysis of the situation and partly facts, this is now being picked up by the media:
http://www.seenit.co.uk/virgin-media...pat-with-uktv/
Think about it, not everyone will be getting a discount, but there have been lots of one off credits in the region of £20 to £50 and recurring discounts of £3 a month upwards.
If we take the case of Itshim, VM have had to give him £10 off per month to keep his custom. It wouldn't have cost VM anywhere near that to provide him with the UKTV channels as an individual customer. It costs them pennies, not pounds, when the cost of providing each channel to each customer.
Then, they will have spent money on the extra staff time that all this has taken up, whilst at the same time facing an unprecedented number of people calling to cancel (don't forget, many will not just be cancelling the TV service either). Ofcom have received complaints that customers are unable to cancel because they simply cannot get through, which is in itself proof of how bad the situation is.
Then, there will be the loss of projected revenue from people paying less or nothing at all due to downgrades or full cancellations. In the future because, as Chad said, people will have lost confidence in the platform to continue to provide the channels that they want there will be a slowdown in customer additions to counteract the churn caused as a result of this. On top of that, people were being prevented from leaving under threat of early exit fees or will have actually had to pay them.
The resultant resentment caused by this won't easily be forgotten by both present subscribers who were effectively forced to stay and former customers who left. The best advertising any business can have is word of mouth recommendation, but it works the other way if people are saying how poorly they were treated after complaining that they had lost channels showing series that they were watching.
For reasons I have gone into before, it's likely that the carriage costs to VM will now be inflated.
And, on top of all this, I can still see an agreement with UKTV being made to get some or all of their channels back onto the platform. In the end, I think that they will find that they have no other choice as, to not to, would be the worst of the two choices that they now have.