Virgin Media Ireland to sell its TV stake?

I didn't know where to post this, but apparently Virgin Media Ireland is considering selling its TV stake..
(FT article which is under paywall)

So I can expect to the ridiculous overconfident Virgin Media brand for their main channels to go into the bin

We did have an Irish TV dedicated thread at one point.

The article is a bit more nuanced than that. Basically LibertyGlobal have been slowly selling off their cable empire in Europe or rolling them into joint ventures. Seemingly they believe fixed and mobile convergence is the future (I’m not sure I’m 100% with them on this - I’m not sure a network provider needs two separate networks that do basically the same thing). An example is rolling VM U.K. into a JV with O2, which is still stuck in regulatory approval at the moment. After that deal goes through, VM Ireland becomes a bit of an orphan. It doesn’t really fit well with what’s left of UPC, in Eastern Europe, and so Mike Firies is talking about offloading it or rolling it into a JV with a mobile company in Ireland. That basically means Vodafone or Three (they will absolutely not be allowed to merge with Eir, or at least I would be totally surprised if the authorities allowed it as it would create a huge broadband monopoly). Now Firies basically makes a comment in the article that a prospective buyer (of the cable network) would absolutely love to also own VMTV but to be honest neither Hutchinson or Vodafone have particularly shown an interest in getting into FTA commercial TV before so I’m not sure why they’d start now.

Thus it would mark the end of the Virgin name for TV channels in Ireland since in the UK, Virgin 1 was rebranded as Channel One in late 2010 after Sky bought Virgin Media Television to expand their channel line before it was replaced by Challenge on Freeview as it was relaunched as Sky Atlantic on Sky.

The renaming the TV3 network in Ireland as Virgin Media One, Two and Three was a huge mistake. Even though TV3 has been ridiculed and lambasted for their lack of original Irish programming over the years, just before the rebrand they were making headway and doing some good work in my opinion, certainly a lot more home produced daytime programmes than RTE One bother with these days.

Are we going to see a return of TV3 to Ireland soon?

Unless the new owners want to pay the name licensing rights to Sir Richard Beardie's empire - a regress back to TV3 is probably on the cards.

The test would be to head out of the major towns or cities, and into the High Street of Ballysleepy and ask, "On your tv in channel order, you have RTE One, RTE Two and then..?" And even today, I bet most people would still go "TV3".

Be interested to see who throws their hat into the ring, if any sale is forthcoming, any time soon.

I’d say the name will change either way, once the U.K. and Irish operations are divorced the rationale for having the name being the same as the U.K. operation will go. In fact presumably the license to use the Virgin Media name will travel with the spin off of the U.K. operation, so VM in Ireland may no longer be allowed to use it. In those circumstances there is usually some sort of clause to allow continued use of the existing brand until a rebrand is put in place and that may cover them pending a sale.

It’s quite clear to me that Liberty Global is basically slowly dismantling itself, with the vast majority of its former operations now either sold off or in JVs, and Ireland will probably be next on the list along with its only two remaining UPC operations in Poland and Slovakia.

Who in their right mind would buy it? It was a Vanity purchase by John Malone at the time (who has a habit of buying anything Irish that's for sale it seems) The station has never made a profit, if you count written off loans and other debts, it had lost up to 250 million euro in the first 18 years of it's existence The only time that it seemed to be going somewhere was when Granada was involved about 15 years ago.

Since It Became Virgin Media Television viewing figures haven't gone up, and none of their home produced programmes do well with the honourable exceptions of content made by their News department. Sports do okay but it seems they'll be losing a lot of their rights in the next year or two. Sports should do a lot better for them, but a lack of HD on Saorview is a major problem, especially when There are HD pictures often available from ITV or BBC.

Without wishing to drag this into a 'fantasy buyers' thread, that's what I was thinking about. Probably not outright, but as a joint bid to make rights easier - but could we see 'ITV Ireland'?

I don't think ITV would go near it at this time. ITV programmes will always have a market in Ireland but it's not a profitable place to run a TV station. It's better for them for someone to buy the rights to their programmes (like Virgin Media have done) and make a profit from sales.

What you could see if someone else bought the station is a better use of ITV programmes, and following the ITV schedule rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

For example, Virgin Media stopped showing This Morning (which got into its weekly top 20 programmes quite a lot at one point) You'd have to assume they thought they could keep the audience with extra Ireland AM and a cheap version of Loose Women, and save a load of money at the same time. Now, most of their Home-made stuff (Ireland AM, Elaine) had audiences roughly at the same level as Pages from Aertel on RTE Network 2 in the early 90's. Obviously, Audiences collapsed. 65% of the country still has access to UTV/ITV. They went off watching This Morning there. Most of the rest of the audience scattered all over the place.

This Morning returned a few months later. The Audiences have recovered but not to the same levels. This has been an ongoing problem with the station. Poor Scheduling of ITV programmes even when they have the rights.

When they did get back This Morning, they were showing it Live on Virgin Media One, It was repeated on Virgin Media Two that afternoon and then was shown again at Midnight on Virgin Media Three!

Mike Fries seems to see the content business (VMTV) going with the cable business (Virgin Media), which based on his comments in the article would have to go to an existing mobile phone company in Ireland. So eir, Vodafone, or Hutchinson, but it won’t be eir, and I don’t see Vodafone or Hutchinson wanting the content business. Also it’s a really odd way to offer your company for sale if you are saying you only want one of two companies to buy it! The whole article is odd really. There is a mention of a legal dispute in Switzerland as an obstacle to deal with eir without apparently taking any notice of the at least two legal disputes in Ireland between eir and VM!

Here’s the article btw
https://www.ft.com/content/e3893643-15ef-48b6-b3b1-3082b23d1a16

I expect ITV have had plenty of opportunities to buy TV3 in the past and have passed on it, didn't they (or maybe it was Granada) have a stake in it at some point. Let's not forget it was only a few years ago they sold UTV Ireland and with ad markets slowly declining I can't imagine they'd be in a rush to get back into that market. They would surely buy STV before they'd buy TV3.

It also highlights how stupid it was to rebrand the channel in the first place to the cumbersome Virgin Media One. Now any potential buyer will have to add on the expense of rebranding the whole family of channels, assuming they don't rebrand it ahead of a sale to make it a more attractive purchase.

Whoever acquires the Virgin Media Television (Ireland) business needs to invest in getting those channels in HD outside the Virgin platform.