Countdown to cheap broadband TV

Broadband TV package prices look to be on the way down soon, with the news that Ofcom is set to slash the price that broadband provider pay to Sky for its premium channels.

At present, Virgin Media, Tiscali and BT are bound to pay Sky the princely sum of £23.50 for every customer on their books. However, early next year Ofcom is planning to cut this by a third to £16.50, on the grounds that Sky’s dominance of the pay TV arena is distorting the market.


Of course this spells a whopping cut to Sky’s revenue – and naturally they plan to challenge the regulation. But for us, should the reduction get passed at least, it looks like a result all round.

With a price reduction of that magnitude, providers will surely pass on the benefits to customers. Leaving us to enjoy cheaper Premier League football and movie premieres as well as more competitively priced broadband bundles. Roll on next year.

ASA rap for Virgin Media

UK internet service providers are no strangers to raps over the knuckles from the Advertising Standards Agency. Over the last couple of years, it’s been the disparity between actual connection speeds and those being delivered that has been at the root of most of complaints that were upheld.

And we've had some splendidly spiteful spats, that's for sure, as broadband companies traded body blows in their ads. But that looked to have come to an end with a pledge before Christmas that they would clean up their act. It seemed to be the broadband industry equivalent of the Hays Code that cleaned up Hollywood with tough censorship rules in the 1930s.

A few months down the track, has it changed them any? Has it hell. This week it emerged that prime offender Virgin Media was in the dock again. The complaints centred on claims that the copper wire network used by other providers is struggling to cope with demand as well as Virgin Media’s loudly trumpeting that its network was a fibre optic. As this ad attests, they've been far from shy about their 50Mb service:



In the end the ASA eventually upheld no fewer than four complaints against them. This brings Virgin Media total to 13 complaints in total since the start of 2007 – a rap sheet to rival even that of supercrim and lifetime lag Charles Bronson.

I can understand Virgin Media doing its upmost to market its 50Mb service. It’s a tough sell at the moment, after all. But unless their campaigns are cleaned up, it won’t just be their public perception that is tainted. Rather it’ll be the whole industry that suffers.

Virgin 50Mb take-up is super-slow

When Virgin Media launched its 50Mb broadband service late last year, it was with no little fanfare. The press conference was held in a beautiful building just off Buckingham Palace, presumably at no little expense. Meanwhile, lavish ads starring Samuel L Jackson ran non-stop over Christmas with a view to convincing everyone that this was a broadband revolution.

Here he is, looking as poised as ever.



Surely if Virgin's 50Mb is good enough for the World's Coolest Actor, then it's plenty good enough for you too? Alas, it seems that for all that marketing spend the public aren’t entirely convinced. This was backed up by a source at a broadband comparison site who demurred that take up for the 50Mb service has been “disappointing” so far.

Granted this lack of demand could perhaps be due in part to the fact that just 1.5 million people can get the service at the moment, but the muted response from the public does not augur well. Moreover, with conditions worsening in the economy day by day, it’s hard to see any improvement in the near future.

The sticking point it's fairly obvious is the price tag. Asking punters to shell out £53 in the current climate was always going to be a tough sell and is getting tougher week by week.

At the launch, the broadband provider’s chief executive officer joked that the host building’s location meant that the Queen was probably a Virgin Media customer. Perhaps that’s because right now she’s the only one who can afford it.

HDTV with slow connections could spell doom for Virgin Media

Virgin Media’s big media blitz for 50Mb service and its USP of delivering high quality HDTV to its subscribers has been dealt a fresh blow today, with the launch of new software called HDi.

According to a report from the Telegraph, the technology is poised to allow consumers who “either cannot afford the highest speed broadband services, or those unable to subscribe to super-fast internet access because of the location of their home and their distance from a telephone exchange” to stream and download high-definition videos over the web.

Alki David, founder of video-streaming website FilmOn.com, who developed HDi, told the newspaper that it works by employing a compression technology that “squeezes the signal so it can be transmitted more quickly." The tech is currently in use by Mr David’s FilmOn service.

It strikes me that the big loser could be none other than Virgin Media. It’s hard to see how HDi will not hit demand for 50Mb service, one of the chief selling points of which was its capacity for delivering HDTV. Worryingly for the ISP, HDi is apparently being demonstrated to BT, the UK’s largest provider. Should therefore an exclusivity deal of some sort be signed between the two parties, Virgin Media's hopes that its faster service could prompt mass migration could be stymied in a stroke.

Doubling the agony for Virgin is that HDi’s launch follows sniping today that as more subscribers use its fibre optic network, the connection speeds it delivers will inevitably decline. This, in turn, followed a report from top internet iconoclasts the Reg that quoted CEO Neil Berkett as seeming to imply that the company was planning to target BitTorrent users. Given that gamers who legitimately use peer to peer sites and who might have expected to sign up for ping-free fast connections in spades will now be baulking at paying for as service that discriminates against them, this is an own goal of Lee Dixon proportions.

Virgin Media should be applauded for its willingness to invest in fibre optic technology capable of bringing of faster broadband to the UK. But it deserves little congratulations over how it has managed the launch of the 50Mb service. Where is now- departed media manipulator par excellance Richard Branson when they need him?