Thursday, February 08, 2007

Sky getting their retaliation in quickly


Branson gives Sky the jitters?
In a sure sign that Bskyb are taking the rebranded Virgin Media (was NTL/Telewest) seriously they have today announced a pay service on Digital terrestrial (DTT).
Press releases are talking about MPEG4 encoding which might be double dutch to some of you out there but in laymans terms it means get a new STB if you want to see the service - very likely it'll run NDS CA software too.
I can’t see this playing well with the regulators concerned about Skys 'smash and grab' raid on ITV shares that scuppered Branson’s hope of a content deal with the then beleaguered pre-Michael Grade ITV.
The move is likely to put the willies up BT Vision bosses too as the TV competitors slug it out for the low cost digital refusenicks.
I will be an interested observer (although not currently holding any signifcant holdings!) in the share price of the concerned parties tomorrow (ITV, BT and Sky are the ones I'm thinking about).
I will also take a punt on ITV news resurfacing as ITV play gets too hot to handle and a lack of competiton on Freeview means it's needed more than ever

1 comment:

Dirk Lemon said...

Based on my experiences today, Sky doesn't have too much to worry about. Having been both a Sky and (current) NTL / Virgin customer I can vouch for the fact that Sky's customer services dept wins hands down.

You'd have thought that especially given NTL's poor track record they'd have got all their ducks in a row for launch day, but no.

I ordered a V+ box last week and it was due for installation between 1-6pm today (in itself a five hour window isn't great).

The guys in the van turned up at 1:30 having driven down from their depot in Milton Keynes...and asked what it is we wanted.

A V+ box? No, sorry mate, the ones for our area (South London) still had all the old logos on them and were sent back to be rebranded. I mean, perish the thought, that the nice new black box under the telly wouldn't have the right branding on it. That really wouldn't do now would it.

I rang up customer services and was assured that they'd be back with a V+ box in tow. 6pm came and went. I called up again and got a 15 minute wait message on the line. At this point it was sounding very much like the NTL millions of us are very familiar with.

When I finally got through, the guy in the call centre did some checking and even though it showed that the stuff was available in our area on the system, the installation guys claimed not to have it.

I was dying to ask Branson about this during his 'ask Richard a question' session in his Covent Garden glass box but unfortunately he'd already logged out.