The dispute between Virgin Media and Sky over the showing of Sky One and other channels on digital cable TV have completely broken down - Virgin Media customers are no longer able to get the Sky Basics TV package - which includes Sky Travel and Sky Sports News - after Sky raised the fees it charged the cable firm.
Virgin Media says it believes that Sky is trying to strong-arm customers into switching providers by denying access to basic channels. Sky says the dispute has come about purely because Virgin refuses to pay its asking price to continue carrying the channels, denying Virgin’s counter-claim that Sky have been asking for “more than double” the amount that had been previously paid.
This has seriously dented the appeal of Virgin Media, barely a month old – its 3.3 million current subscribers are now unable to watch new episodes of Lost, 24, and The Simpsons, as well as everything else on Sky One, Two and Three, Sky News and Sky Sports News. Only the Premium channels, Sky Sports and Sky Movies remain.
Despite this, it has been announced that all three series’ of Lost will be available to Virgin viewers through a deal that has been made with ABC in the US; this is paving the way for BT, whose IPTV services intend to follow Virgin’s footsteps and purchase big-name shows from overseas directly from their producers, without having to come knocking at Sky’s door.
Sky boss Rupert Murdoch also owns the Fox TV network in America – with new British TV networks on the rise, purchasing content from rivals in the States, this development may not be the knockout blow for the competition Sky has possibly hoped it would have been, although, for the moment at least, Virgin Media’s customers are the real losers of this fight.
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