Quote:
Originally Posted by Media Boy
What the joke this weekend has been just because Virgin Media UK are asking an broadcaster who broadcasts BBC repeats - who we pay £150.50 per year for - to take cut in money Virgin pays and more On Demand box set.
But some viewers want Virgin to give in and pay more for BBC repeats. Just to keep 25% of Virgin viewers happy. (According to viewing figures).
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Right, let's make a start on correcting this:
- UKTV does not just 'broadcast BBC repeats'. While it admittedly is a high proportion of their shows, UKTV original productions like Taskmaster and others are not only highly viewed, but also award winning. There's also a significant number of US acquisitions and the like spread over the network.
- UKTV, while half owned by BBC, operates as an independent company. As such, the license fee doesn't go to UKTV in any way at all.
- '25% of Virgin viewers' is an amazingly incorrect data interpretation - and believe me, as data analysis is kinda my job! I'm assuming this comes from the numerous press releases that have flown back and forth, in which cas the quote in question is 'UKTV accounts for more than a quarter of all viewing to pay entertainment channels in Virgin's basic pay TV package'. This isn't the same a quarter of viewers, at all.
In the simplest terms, imagine a group of one hundred people. Let's say each of them watches TV each day for four hours, and one of those hours is spent watching a UKTV channel.
Total viewing across the one hundred people: 400 hours.
Total time viewing UKTV channels: 100 hours
Total proportion of time viewing UKTV channels: 25% (100/400)
Total number of people viewing UKTV channels: 100% (100/100)
So in that example, all the viewers are viewing UKTV shows, for the stated 'quarter of all viewing' time.
I'm not saying that everyone watches UKTV channels - that's just an example to prove the maths. I'm saying that we don't have that information, as 25% of time watched (which is what's being stated) isn't 25% of Virgin's customers. They're different things.
- Even if it WAS just 25% of Virgin Media's customers (which it isn't), then that's one million people who now aren't happy out of the stated four million customers. You'd be hard pressed to find any channel outside of Sky One that has over 50% of Virgin customers watching it regularly... so if we apply the same logic, every channel isn't watched by more than half the viewers, so every channel shouldn't be worried about.
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