remember the pay tv ofcom investigation - turns out SKY missed the deadline

[Stuart C]

Originally Posted by Toto

What profits, they are still paying off debt acrued for purchasing existing networks. How could going further into debt make their business profitable, when many here say they are leaving for one reason or another.

Oh I realise all that.

I am not sure about now, but in the past, where Cable was available, it achieved a greater number of users than Sky. Today, VM have around 4 million customers, yet the DTV network covers (IIRC) around 48% of the population.

So, potentially, Virgin could nearly DOUBLE their customers with proper investment.

---------- Post added at 10:12 ---------- Previous post was at 10:07 ----------

Originally Posted by m419

Thats right,for example Telewest acquired Eurobell for £282 Million in November 2000 and then spent £50,000 on removing Eurobell Telephone boxes which was stupid as money could be made through kiosk-glass advertising.

Thanks to mobile phones, the payphone industry in this country has virtually collapsed. There are still a lot of Payphones around, but BT and other providers have massively cut back on them.

[m419]

Well Spectrum Interactive spent £2 Million in 2005 on acquiring 1,000 Interphone kiosks and replacing them with new ones

Kiosk advertising rakes in about £50 to £100 per month per kiosk and most payphones are heavily used by those using international calling cards via 0800 numbers. All payphone operators are entitled to 8.1p per minute commision when 0500,0800 and 0808 calls are connected and this collected by BT Wholesale and the owner of the freephone number has to pay for it. Apparently 18.3% of Spectrum Interactive's revenue is generated through freephone number calling.

Furthermore, the Virgin Media,Smallworld Media and Wight Cable networks pass approximately 9 Million homes altogether. Between 1994 and 1998 the cable penetration level was much higher, this was because Cable was simply cost effective and very cheap in comparison to using BT and Sky.

Now the shoe is on the other foot, BT and Sky are much more cost effective and because NTL provided a service which was unacceptable in terms of poor customer service and persistant outages and long waits for Digital upgrades, customers got cheesed off and left! Now these customers are going to be hard to retrieve!

Smallworld Media, a very small Cable company in the North are in the process of upgrading its Digital TV boxes for ALL customers not just new ones and will probably advertise the service better once this has happened. My feeling is that it will be swallowed up by Virgin Media.

I suppose another way NTL:Telewest could compete with Sky is to make deals with BT. What NTL should have done is that they should have used BT's brand instead,move all phone customers onto BT and get rid of there cable telephone service as its costing a lot of money to maintain.

That way BT/NTL would be able to provide in about 40% of the country:

Cable TV
Cable Broadband

BT Mobile over Vodafones network
National Telephone service to 97% of the country
ADSL Internet and BT Vision for outer cable areas.

However BT would only have a small percentage of this company and Ntl:Telewest would be leasing the brand for a cheaper price than what they pay for Virgin.


Then there would be no competition issues between Cable and BT and would compete successfully with Sky.