Virgin Media

Setanta signs Virgin Media sports deal


Tara Conlan
Friday July 20, 2007
MediaGuardian.co.uk

Pay-TV group Setanta and Virgin Media have made another move to dent arch-rival BSkyB with a new TV sports package for Virgin's cable customers.
From July 26, new and existing customers who take Virgin Media's XL basic TV package will get six Setanta sports channels for free.

Customers of any other Virgin Media TV service who want to add these Setanta channels to their service will be able to do so for £8 a month.

The move comes ahead of the start of the new football season on August 11, and ratchets up the pressure on Sky as it loses its exclusivity on live Premiership coverage.

Sky has also been unable to counter Setanta's presence on digital terrestrial platform Freeview, as its plans to launch a new pay-TV offering including Sky Sports have been held up by the regulator Ofcom.

Setanta said that today's deal with Virgin Media means cable subscribers will get live coverage from more than 250 showcase events a year.

These include 46 live games from the Barclays Premier League, 60 matches from the Clydesdale Bank Scottish Premier League, the US PGA Tour golf, European League football, and rugby and horse racing from around the UK.

From 2008, customers will also get 25 of the 40 televised fixtures from the English FA Cup, a selection of England football internationals and the Community Shield.

Virgin and Setanta also said the deal means that from the start of the new football season - because of the change to the Premier League broadcasting rights - Virgin Media will be the only provider to offer all the Premiership matches under a single contract.

Virgin Media's chief executive of content, Malcolm Wall, said: "This deal will transform the world of TV sport and makes our XL TV package the best of its kind in the UK. "When we launched Virgin Media last February, we said we were going to shake things up, provide something unique and give our customers superior offerings. Today we're making a down payment on our promise by giving our customers the very best sporting action combined with unbeatable value.

"But this is only the beginning. In terms of both sport and other new high-value content, there's much more to come from Virgin Media."

Setanta and Virgin insisted the move was not a promotional stunt and will form part of Virgin's offering on an "ongoing basis".

Earlier this month Setanta unveiled a new price plan for Freeview and satellite viewers, slashing the price of its sports offering to £9.99 a month.

On Monday, BT Vision also announced it had struck a deal with Setanta. It includes access for its customers to 46 live Premier League games and other sporting fixtures for £12 per month.

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Never been a better time to be a Virgin subscriber really, free Setanta for XL customers, 1,000's of free music videos on-demand, catch-up TV, VOD.

I can get Sky News on DTT. So all is well.

Never been a better time to be a Virgin subscriber really, free Setanta for XL customers, 1,000's of free music videos on-demand, catch-up TV, VOD.

I can get Sky News on DTT. So all is well.

Oh don't be ridiculous.

I'm sorry, but sometimes I wonder whether this thread is being bogged down by people who are in the pay of Virgin Media. I would quickly like to point out that I'm sure that's NOT the case, but the people on this thread are that deluded that I'm wondering.

Here's where I stand. My parents are Virgin Media subscribers. I have a Freeview box in my room. So therefore I have access to the likes of Sky News, which is a million times better than News 24. (Peter f***ing Sissons anyone?)

As far as I'm concerned, Virgin Media is f***ing useless without the likes of Sky One. Sky One is the home to anything remotely useful beyond Sky Sports, Sky Movies etc. It has new Simpons, Lost, 24, Bones, someone else can add to that if they want. But generally, whether it's healthy for TV in the UK or not, it's got it all.

Virgin has Virgin Central, which has f*** all apart from old repeats of Doctor Who and Little Britain. Which sometimes don't work, as evidenced by frustrated BBCi customers (it's quicker and more efficient on Freeview, which costs NOTHING).

Virgin Media is the poorest excuse for a cable company that I have ever subscribed to, and I go back to the days of Clyde Cable Vision which had about 10 orirginal channels, a lot of cable channels and b****r all else. I'm afraid the viewers have moved on from there, and so should the company.

Hopefully the eventual owners (I presume the asset-strippers...um... 'capital company' won't be there for long) will do a better job. Because, no matter what Sky's ridiculous tactics may be - a) the company which distributes your channels as far as I am concerned does their deals on your behalf and b) Virgin hasn't. It's been there to win points on Sky, and has done a s*** job of doing so. Thank Christ Virgin isn't in charge of anything more important. It's destroyed the entire brand.

The sooner the whole Virgin fiasco ends, the better. It's been the biggest disaster to happen to UK cable (and there's been quite a few) that I have known in my lifetime.

That is perhaps the biggest load of horsesh!t that I have ever read. If I was bored enough, I could easily tear apart each sentence of what you have written, but thankfully I will never be that bored. That you have decided that your opinions should be accepted by everybody else as fact is indicative of your general level of delusion in making that post.

I think the overall quality of your post can in fact be summed up in your assertions that: a) "Sky News is a million times better than News 24" - were that to be the case, it would beg the question of why Sky's ratings have slowly but surely declined since its major studio revamp while News 24's have increased to the point that it is now the decisive ratings winner, even without the help of BBC One simulcasts; and b) the ongoing dispute with BSkyB has "destroyed the Virgin brand" - I've not really seen a great deal of coverage regarding the destruction of the Virgin brand, nor of the inevitable backlash against the dozens of Virgin-branded companies that would surely have resulted from such a massive marketing failure, so again I'm rather confused as to why this evidently false opinion of yours should be accepted by the rest of us.

You've clearly got a bee in your bonnet about something to do with Virgin Media, but externalising your issues through spurious and nonsensical ramblings won't help you to deal with them - so perhaps it's best if you just write them down on your blog or in a diary, and avoid boring us with them through your inane ramblings.

Well I came on here all guns blazing, so I guess I deserved some of it shot back at me.

Yep, the overall tone is a bit arrogant. That's drinking and Saturday for you. But I still stand by the general theme of it. I'm slightly concerned that some people have that much of a bee in their bonnet about it, but there you go.

News 24 v Sky News - two points here: a) are ratings the deciding factor in what is the best news channel?; and b) the ratings for Sky News fell due to the fact it can no longer be viewed in cable channels, and due to a daft plan to introduce 'appointment to view' which has hastily been scrapped. It's now back up and running again and in my opinion is consistently better. News 24 seems to consistently be where the BBC either tries out new presenters who don't know what they're doing on a news channel, or dump people they don't know what to do with (Sissons anyone?)

The Virgin Media brand (and I should maybe have made it clear that this is what I meant) is taking a kicking from this whole dispute. Anyone I speak to is raging about the service on offer from Virgin - whether it be the fact the red button on any BBC channel is unusable, the loss of utter key channels without any reduction in our bills, the poor customer service. It doesn't matter if the media gossips aren't reporting on it, it's what people are saying on the ground.

With regard to what relevance Clyde Cable has - some of us remember in the old days when cable had the best of both worlds. When Sky and BSB were fighting it out, we got both sets of channels. Now we're in the middle of the battleground and we have lost key channels because of it.

I think the fact that Virgin Media is up for sale tells you all you need to know.

The Virgin Media brand (and I should maybe have made it clear that this is what I meant) is taking a kicking from this whole dispute. Anyone I speak to is raging about the service on offer from Virgin - whether it be the fact the red button on any BBC channel is unusable, the loss of utter key channels without any reduction in our bills, the poor customer service. It doesn't matter if the media gossips aren't reporting on it, it's what people are saying on the ground.