Virgin Media reveals Sky channel cost and subscriber growth

LONDON - Virgin Media has added 37,800 subscribers to its TV service in the third quarter -- and says it will be paying £30m-£38m per year to get BSkyB's basic channels back on its platform.

Virgin will pay Sky a licence fee of £30m per year and additional performance-based payments up to a maximum of £6m in year one, £8m in year two and £7.9m in the final seven months of the term.

The two sides have agreed exactly the same deal for the carriage of Virgin Media Television's channels, which include Living and Bravo, on Sky's cable platform.

The agreement reached on Tuesday came 19 months after Sky pulled the channels when Virgin refused to meet its request for £48.4m per year. The amount Virgin paid in 2006 was £23.6m.

Sky managed to reduce the amount it paid for Virgin's channels from £35.6m in 2006 to £5.1m in 2007 after threatening to pay nothing for them.

Virgin Media's TV subscriber base has grown to 3.58m with the 37,8000 new additions, which compares unfavourably with Sky's recruitment of 87,000 new customers in the same quarter.

Its financial results revealed a net loss of £120.8m, compared with a loss of £61m a year ago, with revenues down 1.5% to £991.1m.

Virgin continues to focus on exploiting the advantage of its cable offering.

Its on-demand service is now used by 1.7m of its digital TV customers, with average views per user per month up to 27 from 17 a year ago.

It is also preparing to launch its 50MB broadband service next quarter.

Finally, it reported record sales of Virgin Mobile contracts of 78,300, mainly through cross-sell to its cable customers, taking its total to 578,600.

 

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