May 29, 2009

Sky heads the pack for Living, Virgin1 et al

According to the Financial Times, Sky is going to be the new home of Virgin Media's television brands Living, Bravo, Challenge and Virgin1:
"British Sky Broadcasting has made what appears to be a knock-out bid for a package of seven digital television channels owned by Virgin Media, offering about 60% higher than its nearest challenger. None of the other declared bidders, including Channel 4, Time Warner, RTL and NBC Universal, have bid much more than £100m - well short of BSkyB’s £160m approach. The BSkyB bid creates a dilemma for Virgin Media, which aims to reduce its net debt of £5.9bn but would hesitate to sell to its fiercest rival in the distribution of programming."
Full story here. At least one company see the high definition possibilities for these US-show-centric channels...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

So virgin 1 hd will only be on Sky?
That sounds about right!

Nialli said...

It's a tough call for VM: sell to Sky (including a Virgin branded channel) or go to a lower bidder. Depends on what they value more: the brand or the money.
I would expect any contract of sale to have something in it about continued availability on cable of the channels (and possibly HD variants), but who knows?

Anonymous said...

to sell to sky would just proved once and for all virgin aint interested in the tv side,And you can get within weeks of sky HD versions of the channels would be up and running basically sticking up two fingers at VM.If they had any brains the price would include all access to there hd channels at a fair price.

Andy said...

I really hope Sky don't get these channels. Whatever happens, it will be Sky who come out best. They are good at this sly game of monopoly. I feel for Virgin sometimes. Even when it comes to HD. It's very very difficult for them to keep up.