Virgin Media subscriber numbers

The Cush wrote: »

Unlikely, probably for most of their MMDS subscribers UPC don't have a replacement service for them so they'll hang on to that revenue stream for as long as they can. They're not going to push them to Sky too soon.

That is assuming that the revenue from those customers is greater then the maintenance and operating costs of the MMDS network. There will eventually be a tipping point where there just aren't enough customers on it to keep it going.

SpaceTime wrote: »

Is the Virgin Media TiVo box substantially better?

From reviews I've read from the UK, not only is it vastly superior, but most people seem to think it is also much better then Sky HD!

JTMan wrote: »

In the USA, digital TV subs are also falling. UPC are part of a global trend. Streaming is replacing linear digital TV bundled packages. kids under 18 are 50% (yes, 50%) less likely to watch linear digital TV than 5 years ago. UPC have started into what could be a death spiral with linear TV bundled packages. There is a long way down to go. Forced 'free' TV bundles might help in the short-term but bundled linear TV packages are gradually being replaced by streaming. UPC, like all other global bundled TV providers, are in trouble.

Yes, cord cutting is a definite trend. However it isn't all doom and gloom for UPC. What you need to remember is that they are no longer a TV company, they are now a broadband company.

Obviously they like the extra free revenue from selling people TV, but it is no longer key to their business. As long as people are paying for broadband, then they are making money.

However they do need to be concerned about Eircom and SIRO rolling out FTTH and becoming a greater threat to their core broadband business. I've no doubt they are already planning 500Mb/s services and even 1Gb/s services. But they may eventually have to think about rolling out their own FTTH network to compete.

I expect that ad supported TV, will largely end up becoming free from UPC, Eircom and Vodafone, when bundled with broadband, just like phone services are now.

I'd be much more concerned with Sky. I don't know how much future they have given that they don't have their own broadband network. They are looking very weak IMO.

Lots of interesting comments.

SpaceTime wrote: »

Sky control access to most of the content of value though.

I certainly wouldn't say that.

They have a grip on Sports, but even that is slipping.

All the Sky Sports channels combined have a viewing figure of only about 2%

No Sky channel has a viewing figure of more then 1%! All Sky channels together (Sky 1, Atlantic, Living, Sports, Movies, News, etc.) add up to a market share of just 8.3%

Meanwhile, 5 UK national channels viewing figures are 52% and when you look at the top 30 freeview/freesat channels (all the various More4, ITV2's, etc.) they end up with nearly 90% of the viewing audience.

http://www.barb.co.uk/trendspotting/analysis/share-of-viewing-by-channel?_s=4
http://www.barb.co.uk/whats-new/weekly-viewing-summary

Sky have already lost control of Movies, due to over the top on-demand movie services. Their control of quality content is slipping due to Netflix and Amazon Prime.

And now their control of sports is looking to be at risk. The main reason Sky had such control of sports, is because they owned and controlled the largest pay TV platform, which made it hard for anyone else to buy into and distribute sports.

But with the pay TV market fracturing and IPTV and over the top streaming popping up, it gives other companies an alternative avenue to Sky to distribute sports.

Other companies can buy the sports rights and deliver them via over the top streaming and IPTV and completely bypass Sky. That is how we have seen BT Sports come about to threaten Sky Sports and I expect we will see others in future like ESPN, Eurosports and MLB *.

* Yes, Major League Baseball from the US! I know it sounds weird, but they have built a very sophisticated over the top streaming operation in the US and they are now buying up the rights to streaming other sports like the NHL in the US. They are now a major player.

All of this is why I say Sky are looking to be on very shaky ground. Without their own broadband network, they look increasingly like they lack the means to control the market.

I'm not saying that they are going to go burst tomorrow! But that if they want to remain relevant, I think they need to focus on turning themselves into a mix of Netflix, HBO OnDemand and MLB.

They are starting to do that with Sky GO, but so far their efforts haven't been very impressive. Their technology isn't very good and they seem to be moving far too slow and stuck too much in still thinking they have a monopoly and can charge high prices.

If they aren't careful they could end up getting quickly overtaking by smaller, nimble startups like Netflix and Amazon and also by much larger international companies like HBO, Google, Apple, etc., nevermind their local competitors like BT, BBC (BBC Player, etc.).

We are facing very interesting times in the TV industry and I doubt Sky will still as powerful as they are today.

JTMan wrote: »

A company's business is defined from where its revenue pertains.

UPC know the future is broadband but UPC still make huge, but declining, revenue from linear bundles TV packages.

UPC are a linear TV provider and broadband provider and a landline provider. These are UPC's biggest revenue lines.

The gradual death of linear TV bundles is going to hurt UPC badly over the coming years. UPC can only bundle so much free-add ons with their broadband before competitors under cut with broadband only packages.

Of course, the lost revenue from TV will hurt, no doubt. But what I was getting at is that some people seem to think that because TV revenue is declining that UPC are doomed!

That clearly isn't the case and I just wanted to inject a bit of reality.

I think years ago that UPC recognised that the linear TV business wouldn't continue for ever, so they diversified very successfully into broadband and phone and now continue to diversify into mobile (UPC mobile) and content (TV3 purchase).

Sure, they will milk the linear TV for as long as they can. And it will hurt when it goes away, but UPC will remain a profitable company due to it's diversification. In fact they may well end up more profitable as a diversified company then back when they were just a TV company. Similar to how Apple is MUCH more profitable when it diversified into ipods, iphones, ipads, etc. from just being a mac maker.

Also what I was trying to get at is that the companies core business has now changed. In the past, they were primarily a TV distribution company, where TV subs paid for their network and made some profit and broadbnad was then an extra bonus revenue on top of that if they got it. Now that has flipped, they are now a communications company, for whom broadband subs pay for the network and makes them some profit, while TV subs are an extra bonus revenue on top of that.

This is happening all over the industry, former cableco's, teleco's, mobico's are all changing into just diversified dataco's that carry a variety of services (TV, voice, mobile, etc.) over their data networks.

icdg wrote: »

It will probably be UK kit in future. Although still using the UPC brand, UPC Ireland was "sold" by UPC to Virgin Media last year (in reality, since they are both Liberty Global subsidiaries, it is just an internal reorganisation).

Yes, I've heard rumours that the UPC Ireland staff are working closely with the Virgin Media hardware staff. Which is great as Virgin have great hardware.

Not just the TiVo box, but also their modems. Unlike UPC's modems, Virgins are again highly recommended and reviewed. They are dual radio, dual band, 802.11ac models with excellent wifi performance and bridging supported as an easy option in the admin menus. In other words the complete opposite of UPC.

SpaceTime wrote: »

Both virginmedia.ie and virginmobile.ie are registered by Virgin already.

I'd say a full rebrand as Virgin is likely in the next while.

Ideal thing would be to launch Virgin Mobile from UPC and then ditch the UPC brand in 2016.

There's a lot of crossover from UK media here so, having the Virgin brand just consolidates the message.

I've always though UPC is a fairly weak / bland identity anyway. It's just an old Dutch achronym from United Philips Cable. Seems the Dutch agree too, considering they've gone for Ziggo.

Maybe they're not as bothered with a pan European single brand as they were a few years ago.

virginmedia.ie and viginmobile.ie already registere, that is very interesting.

However I do think they will launch it as UPC Mobile, they already sort of have:

http://www.upc.ie/customer-support/mobile/

It is already available to select UPC customers for testing. €15 per month gets you unlimited calls, texts and data! Quiet an attractive deal.

I guess the transfer to the Virgin Media brand just wasn't ready yet.

And yes, LGI (UPC's parent) has noticeably been splitting up the UPC brand. They now use the following brands around europe: Virgin Media, Ziggo, Telenet, Untiymedia and cablecom. Noticeably, with the exception of Ireland, they are mostly only using the UPC brand for the Eastern European operations now (Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia).

So yes, I wouldn't be surprised if it was renamed and I agree that UPC is a very bland brand.

SpaceTime wrote: »

I'm not sure that that Ziggo product is the same thing. They'll still want a media gateway / box to provide DVR functions. Not many Smart TVs have 6 cable tuners on board. Although it may become irrelevant if you can fully cloud base everything and move away from linear TV entirely.

I can see rights issues cropping up with Sky etc in this market if it comes to steaming all channels on demand and moving away from linear cable channels while Sky don't have the technology platform and network to do that yet...

For the moment they seem to be only releasing this in the more cost conscious Eastern European markets.

I really don't think you need a large, expensive DVR, if everything is in the cloud. If you have 7 day catchup of all channels, on demand and the option to record and save in the cloud, then you really don't need anything complicated on the client side.

Who needs six tuners, when you can basically have unlimited tuners to record unlimited numbers of shows in the cloud. To be honest, the whole concept of "recording" goes away with catchup services and on demand services.

This service still supports linear TV, it just moves all the hardware, hard drives, tuners, recorders to the data center. To be honest the whole concept of having a big, expensive DVR, with a powerful CPU, lots of HDD space and 6 tuners sitting there most of the day, largely unused, is incredibly inefficient.

Consolidated into a server farm, with de-duplication of recordings, etc. you would need far less resources to deliver the same level of service.

It makes a lot of sense for them to use this approach in the low revenue, cost concious Eastern European markets.

And to be honest, I think in the long term it would make a lot of sense for Ireland too and I'd love to have it myself.

Imagine if the only hardware you got from UPC was a little stick that plugged into your HDMI port like an Amazon Fire TV. Now imagine if you launched the UPC app on your iPad and the exact same interface, with all your content, favourites, upcoming shows, recordings appeared there too, nice

The only downside would possibly be channel changing speed * and of course you have no TV if the broadband service goes down.

* This can be mitigated with clever programming and enough bandwidth. For instance you could also stream the channel before and after the current watched channel, perhaps at a lower bitrate, so that they appear quickly when you flick between channels.

7upfree wrote: »

How so? From the ads it seems you can only record two channels??

Very easy to use user interface that is fast and responsive.

It learns from what you watch and record and based on that it gives very good recommendations for other shows you might like on the home page.

BTW it actually has 3 tuners, so you can record two other channels while watching another one. Sky HD box only has 2 tuners and the Horizon box 4.

http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/tvs-entertainment/pvrs/52517/virgin-media-tivo-1tb-review

BTW 15 years ago, I used a second hand TiVo imported from the US and hacked to make it work with UPC analogue service. Obviously it didn't support HD, etc. but even back then the interface was nicer and faster then Sky HD is today! So I can well believe that new models are a big improvement.

7upfree wrote: »

Is it not the case that you can record three, but must then only watch a recording? Or am I wrong?

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1627745

Yes, that is correct.

If you have your TV turned off, you can actually record 3 channels simultaneously.

If you are watching something, then you can record that channel, plus two others.

7upfree wrote: »

Doesn't Horizon have five??

http://www.upc.ie/television/horizon-tv/

I was wrong earlier, it has 6 tuners:

- 4 to record other channels
- 1 to watch the current channel
- 1 to preload the next channel in the EPG (for quick channel change).

Interesting, if this trend continues, it looks like by next quarter Virgin/UPC will have more internet customers then TV customers.