The Empire Strikes Back
Monday, July 9th, 2007Satcaster responds, submits papers to the High Court
In the courtroom, Sky have formally rejected claims by Virgin Media that it abused its dominant position by lowering the prices it paid for the cable group’s channels and raising the price for its own.
In papers submitted to the High Court, Sky state that the breakdown in negotiations that resulted in the withdrawal of channels from Virgin’s platform was “not the result of any market failure or breach of competition law… rather it was a product of Virgin Media’s commercial conduct and decisions”.
Sky had drastically reduced the price it was willing to pay for rights to broadcast Virgin-owned channels such as Bravo, LivingTV, Trouble and Challenge channels from £33.4m to £6.7m. Sky said that it “did not consider any of the Bravo, Challenge or Trouble channels [to be] effective tools for the acquisition or retention of subscribers”, which is a nice way of saying that Bravo et al – home of Digital TV favourites such as Booze Britain and Dog the Bounty Hunter – are crap.
Sky also insisted on a 13% price increase for its own channels, which took the total cost of carriage fees to around £40m. Virgin were unwilling to pay more than £30m, but Sky, in what they say was an attempt to compromise, lowered their initial offer to a 6% increase, at £35.7m – Sky are saying that Virgin refused to meet them halfway by refusing this offer or making one of their own.
In light of the recent announcements concerning the possibility of a takeover of Virgin by a number of private equity groups, Sky said: “If there is a change of ownership at Virgin Media, we hope that any new management would take a more rational approach.”
It has been rumoured that any possible buyout, whilst seeing Sir Richard Branson retaining his share in the group, would see the cable company undergo yet another rebrand, which, given the first quarter performance of Virgin Media may help restore public confidence in the quad play provider.
Meanwhile, Sky have taken a pasting from the BBC and Channel 4 as well as Virgin who have all lined up to condemn the controlling 17.9% Sky stake in ITV. The Beeb said that the purchase represented a “great [ ] public interest concern remains with regard to plurality of voice in the provision of news,” with C4 reinforcing this view with:
“The bringing under common control two of the three material television news suppliers is not in the public interest since it will result in an unacceptable reduction of plurality of persons with control of UK media enterprises.”
News International, which owns Sky, also owns and runs UK newspapers The Times and The Sun, as well as Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox, Myspace, and the Fox TV network in the US.
June 28th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Go Ricky!
Watched the fight live on Setanta and loved every minute of it. He’s a real gritty old school fighter and deserves all the credit he gets. I just hope he can get De La Hoya or Mayweather out of retirement and beat them!
July 3rd, 2007 at 1:32 pm
It sure was a good display by Hatton, I haven’t seen him perform that well in quite a few of his last fights.
I personally would like to see him fight Floyd Mayweather, as it would be a clash of two totally different styles.
July 3rd, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Personally, I would sway towards Hatton v Mayweather so Ricky could catch him hard in the jaw to stop all that jibber jabber that comes outta Mayweather’s mouth!!!
July 12th, 2007 at 8:37 am
Hopefully a rebrand will happen, and cable TV won’t be devoid of Sky channels for much longer.
Fibre optics is the future, yeah? BELEIVE the clever-lution.
July 13th, 2007 at 9:21 am
I am interested to see how this will turn out for Sky.
At the moment Sky are signing exclusive contracts for all the good programming, and then selling it back. This makes good business for everyone except the consumer and you also have long ad breaks between all programs.
I rather buy the DVD box set and sit down for a nice marathon session.