BBC recap of the Sky vs Virgin situation
March 12th, 2007 by TellyWars
A very good recap of the situation on the BBC website - it includes a Q&A session which clarifies a lot of speculation around the topic.
The article shows some good examples of how down n dirty this whole affair has become, citing one example:
“When Virgin Media’s chief executive first refused to pay the asking price, Sky retaliated by showing adverts urging cable TV customers to contact Virgin Media’s customer service helpline and demand the cable TV operator show Sky One.”
The UK cable market is more than just TV channels - both major operators also have other multiple channels of communication in their portfolios and will keenly be looking into the future for their respective advertising businesses.
A solid share of the UK cable market enables each company to leverage their services to both consumers and businesses alike. Why just advertise on TV when you can also advertise directly to consumers via mobile phones, broadband packages and the like?
It’s a pretty clever way of positioning the “pieces” of their business to take on the online UK advertising market (which has been dominated by Google over the past 2 years, to the detrement of TV advertising spend). It isn’t suprising that they are getting down and dirty with each other just now over seemingly minor issues. Any advantage helps in the arms race!
TW
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This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 3:22 am and is filed under BSkyB, VirginMedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.