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9 in 10 Londoners will soon have free Wi-Fi in Tube stations

David Meyer — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:43:11 +0000

From June, almost all Londoners should be able to get free Wi-Fi access in London Underground stations, after O2 became the latest major carrier to sign up as a wholesale customer of Virgin Media.

Virgin Media has been providing internet access in Tube stations since the Olympics in mid-2012. The service was initially free for all, but after the Games, Virgin started charging on a daily, weekly or monthly basis for those who aren’t customers of Virgin Mobile or the company’s fixed-line services. EE and Vodafone – respectively, the UK’s first and third-largest mobile carriers — signed up as wholesale partners in November, ensuring that their customers would also get free access.

O2, the second-largest mobile operator, has now done the same, with its customers getting access from June. According to Virgin, those three carriers account for 89 percent of London’s population, leaving only overseas tourists and subscribers of other carriers – notably the smallest of the big four, Three – having to pay up for access.

“Having O2 on board is excellent news for the thousands of people that use the Tube every day,” London Underground strategy chief Gareth Powell said in a statement. “Most customers will now be able to access live travel information or use social media to plan their social life while on the move.”

London Underground also used the announcement to reveal 12 more stations that will be Wi-Fi-enabled, including Baker Street, Bank, Earl’s Court and Sloane Square. The total number of stations bearing connectivity is now 120 (the Tube network has 270 stations, although many aren’t in central London, as the Wi-Fi-enabled ones tend to be).

I’ve asked Three whether it’s talking to Virgin about getting its customers into the scheme, and will add the response in when I get it.

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EE harnesses London cabs to tout its 4G prowess

David Meyer — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 15:12:28 +0000

Right now, Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom’s EE joint venture is the only 4G-toting carrier in the United Kingdom. That will change soon enough though, as the much-delayed 4G spectrum auction is now done and dusted, so EE is doing all it can to capitalize on its early start.

The operator’s latest marketing tactic involves one of London’s greatest icons: the Hackney carriage, or “black cab” as most people call it. EE has put a 4G MiFi router into 50 of the vehicles in London and Birmingham (40 in the former, 10 in the latter), and passengers will be able to use the service for free.

Displaying a true marketing professional’s grasp of physics, EE brand chief Spencer McHugh claimed in a statement that users will be able to “browse, download, catch up on emails, Tweet and check Facebook literally at the speed of light”.

EE’s three-month promotion is not the first to combine the black cab with wireless connectivity. Back in December, ad firm Eyetease said it had gained approval from London’s transport authorities to put hotspots into the vehicles, with users needing to watch a 15-second ad in order to get 15 minutes of free surfing. The ISP Virgin Media also gains a great deal of exposure by providing Wi-Fi for commuters in certain London Underground stations.

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Liberty Global buys minority stake in Dutch ISP Ziggo for $810M

David Meyer — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:27:14 +0000

Liberty Global, which became the largest ISP outside China when it bought Virgin Media in February, has made another investment in Europe, this time by buying a stake in Dutch cable operator Ziggo.

Ziggo is the largest cable provider in the Netherlands. Liberty announced on Thursday that it had picked up 25.3 million shares in the ISP at a total value of €632.5 million ($810.2 million), giving it a 12.65 percent stake.

This is not Liberty’s first Dutch investment. Indeed, it is also the owner of UPC — founded in the Netherlands — which provides broadband services across 10 European countries, namely the Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland and Romania. In the Netherlands, UPC is the second-largest cable provider. Liberty also holds a majority stake in Belgium’s Telenet and maintains a European content division called Chellomedia.

According to Thursday’s statement:

“Liberty Global considers the acquisition of this minority stake in Ziggo as an attractive opportunity to make a strategic investment in a market where it already enjoys a sizeable presence through its UPC Netherlands subsidiary. The Purchase Price is also financially attractive given the stock’s approximate 7.4 percent dividend yield, which is implied by Ziggo’s expectation that it will pay €370 million of dividends during 2013.”

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Liberty buys Virgin, creating largest broadband company outside China

David Meyer — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 10:08:19 +0000

The cable giant Liberty Global has bought UK-based Virgin Media in a cash-and-stock deal worth $23.3 billion, creating what they claim is “the world’s leading broadband communications company” with 25 million customers across 14 countries.

That “world’s leading” tag is debatable, as China Telecom claims more than 90 million broadband subscribers, but this is nonetheless a big deal, taking the combined operation way past the likes of Comcast (18.7 million subscribers). The operation will focus on “the strongest and most strategic markets in Europe”, delivering the triple-play hit of broadband, telephony and digital TV while also pushing mobility and B2B products.

Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries said in a statement:

“Adding Virgin Media to our large and growing European operations is a natural extension of the value creation strategy we’ve been successfully using for over seven years.

“Virgin Media will add significant scale and a first-class management team in Europe’s largest and most dynamic media and communications market [the UK]. After the deal, roughly 80 percent of Liberty Global’s revenue will come from just five attractive and strong countries — the UK, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands.”

Europe is such a strong focus for the combined company that Liberty Global will “redomicile” from Delaware to the UK, although its headquarters will stay put. The company will continue to be Nasdaq-listed, although it may list on a European stock exchange as well. Virgin will hang onto its brand.

The implications of this deal could be wide-ranging. It will certainly bolster Virgin’s chances in the UK pay TV market against Rupert Murdoch and BSkyB.

Virgin also has a very good hybrid cable/fibre broadband network in the UK that was created out of the merger of NTL and Telewest half a dozen years ago. John Malone’s Liberty, previously a major shareholder in Telewest, had itself tried and failed to execute such a merger, so today’s deal is the culmination of a long-term ambition.

At the same time, it also seems to be about taking advantage of Virgin Media’s tax losses and low interest rates, according to sources referred to by the Financial Times.

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For Connected TV, The New Last Mile Is Dining Room To Living Room

Robert Andrews — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:33:01 +0000

Last week, I lambasted Virgin Media for taking two years to launch its iPad TV guide for its TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) set-top box.

I have since learned the app has been ready for months; it was submitted to and approved by Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) months ago. But Virgin Media is choosing to sit on it as it considers how to tackle a problem that will soon be shared by fellow connected TV operators…

For Virgin’s iPad app – which lets users switch channels and record shows from their sofa – to work, customers’ set-top box and iPad must be on the same home network. The problem – unlike iPad, Virgin Media’s TiVo is not WiFi-enabled.

That means customers keen to use the new wave of second screen controllers must run cable from their WiFi router to their set-top box. In many cases, like my own, consumers’ routers are not in the same room as their main TV.

And that poses a big challenge to operators – how can Virgin Media launch its fancy new app experience when it knows it will instantly disappoint thousands of consumers who can’t use it? And how does the company manage requests from customers who want its engineers to relocate their WiFi router or run extra cabling?

I discovered this issue first-hand last week. The social TV startup Zeebox’s app also includes an EPG and controller that already works with internet TVs and Virgin’s own TiVo box. But, for weeks, I tried and failed to get the two talking.

It was only in conversation with Zeebox product head Morten Eidal that I realised a cable must be run from router to set-top box. Zeebox has since improved its user documentation to make the fact more clear. And Virgin Media itself will need to approach the same challenge.

This is an issue that will become more prominent as more TV services launch on wireless gadgets and as more electronics manufacturers ship internet-connectable TVs…

I have been hearing actual connections of connectable TVs range from only five percent to 20 percent, compared with Xbox connection rates of up to 60 percent. Some say the problem may be unedifying internet content, but connection confusion may also be to blame. If the new wave of customers buying 2012 internet TVs gets home to realise further wiring is necessary, they will feel disappointed.

The problem can be solved either by manufacturers WiFi-enabling their devices or by offering bolt-on WiFi-enabling dongles separately.

For example, Samsung sells a dongle for its WiFi-less internet TVs, and BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) offers a dongle for its Sky+ boxes to customers who want its Anytime+ internet on-demand service. Zeebox’s Eidal suggested I use Homeplugs to direct my WiFi router through my home’s electricity loop and, from a wall socket, in to my TiVo via cable.

Each method could be a way for Virgin and others to finally launch its TiVo and other apps. But each also adds extra expense to this new wave of products and services. And that could blunt initial adoption, at least until WiFi becomes more commonplace in them from the start.

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Virgin's TiVo Slow-Mo: An iPad App, Two Years Later

Robert Andrews — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 20:35:08 +0000

Talk about “agile development”! Virgin Media has finally put a September 2012 launch date on the long-promised iPad controller for its TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) set-top boxes – that’s almost two years after the app was first mooted.

Summer 2010

Virgin Media said it would launch a rejigged version of TiVo’s U.S. Premiere box in the UK. TiVo then said it would launch an iPad controller for U.S. premieres.

December 2010

Virgin duly said it would, in due course, also ship a rebadged version of that app.

January 2011

Virgin Media launched the TiVo boxes as planned. At the same time, TiVo released its iPad app. But where was Virgin’s iPad app?

February 2011

CEO Neil Berkett promised Virgin customers: “There is an iPad app available today which we will launch in the second half of the year.”

June 2011

Virgin Media issued mock-up screenshots of the still-in-development software to satiate eager adopters.

But 2011 came and went with no sign of Berkett’s app.

February 2012

On the first anniversary of TiVo’s UK relaunch, Virgin executives faced questions from curious City investment analysts: Where the heck was the app?

“We’ve got it, it works,” chief operating officer Andrew Barron said. “Ninety-nine percent of companies would have rolled it out by now – it’s stable, impressive – but we haven’t…

“We wanted to make sure … that, when it hits, it goes mass-market quite quickly and is not viewed as some flaky application for enthusiasts but is polished and doesn’t generate calls to support. It shows you our philosophy – we’re a mass-market company.”

If you say so.

March 2012

Now, at Cable Congress 2012 in Brussels on Thursday, CEO Neil Berkett gave a revised timeline – the app will finally be out in September 2012, The Register reports.

Tortoise and the hare

That is a phenomenally long gestation in a TV world now being disrupted by nimble new entrants, who are increasingly using rapid web development, test and release cycles to get innovative products in to the marketplace quickly, without stopping to ask questions.

The Zeebox startup managed to build an iPad TV EPG with built-in social features, contextual show pages and click-to-buy in a matter of months, earning it a partnership that effectively makes it the supplier for such technology to Virgin rival BSkyB.

One more feature Zeebox users enjoy – an integrated TV controller that works with… you guessed it… Virgin Media’s TiVo….

In other words, Sky has beaten Virgin to releasing an iPad app for Virgin.

TiVo is a significant leap forward from Virgin Media’s previous set-top box. But Virgin has been remarkably slow to re-skin an already-existing product, and the paucity of TV “apps” available on TiVo boxes suggests more big-company thinking than the “open platform” mantra executives have espoused on their TiVo trajectory.

The lesson here: must be more nimble.

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The lessons of Virgin Media’s flexible working initiative

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:00:05 +0000

This morning UK digital communication provider Virgin Media announced it’s rolling out a clutch of Cisco social and remote business tools to 5,000 employees following a successful pilot of the tools, including WebEx, Quad and Unified Communications. That’s good news for both Cisco and Virgin Media and illustrates that enterprise social is continuing to gather steam, but what does it have to do with your team?

Last week we called up Colin Miles, head of technical services at Virgin Media, and Keith Griffin, technical leader in engineering at Cisco to ask for the behind-the-scenes story of the pilot and what lessons it might hold for other companies or teams looking to roll out similar solutions. Not every switch over to new-fangled social or collaboration tools goes smoothly, but according to Miles Virgin’s pilot was relatively bump free.

The benefits

“We wanted the opportunity to really test how a full transformation of communication and collaboration could affect our organization,” Miles said of the pilot, “and the results have been absolutely fantastic.” How do they know things work so well? Participants in the pilot showed a six percent higher engagement-index in the firm’s annual engagement survey. The pilot also aimed to increase productivity and agility, while decreasing email overload a well as duplicated and inconsistent materials. Miles says Virgin Media has seen improvement in all these areas.

Particularly, the new tools have made life easier for teams whose work touches a variety of divisions within the organization. The company’s B2B provisioning group, for instance, has found that forming a Quad community (somewhat akin to a Facebook group) has eliminated organizational hassles. “This is a community that deals with a core, single business process, i.e. start something from a customer order through to customer delivery,” explains Miles. “However, it touches many divisions within that process, so trying to collaborate effectively can be hard work sometimes. By creating a community to share the information more effectively in one place – one version of the truth – that lends itself to breaking down those divisional silos.”

Griffin reports that social tools have had similar benefits within Cisco. “Back when we were starting with Quad we’d post something in created communities around topics like ‘the technology behind 2.0′ and we found that multiple people from other groups in other areas of Cisco were coming in joining that community rather than setting up their own,” explains Griffin. “That served two purposes. One, it became, as Colin said, a single source of truth for that topic, but secondly, it avoided duplication. We could see that teams were working on similar items and collaborating to get things done all at one place.”

The tips

These benefits aren’t instant, not are they automatic. Careful planning and consideration of how the tools are introduced is key, according to both Miles and Griffin.

One size doesn’t fit all. “We have a very wide spectrum of employee in terms of age range and technical capability, so they’re naturally those that are very technically adept and will leap at the opportunity to try a new tool, and there are others that are slightly more hesitant around how they work towards it,” says Miles. One type of training wasn’t enough to get everyone up to speed and willing to make changes, especially when it came to a social tool like Quad that fundamentally alters how information gets shared. Miles explains what did work:

We couldn’t just deliver a simple technical training course and people would naturally adopt the technology all at the same rate. We had to create a unique and individual set of adoption processes that included everything from one-to-one training to self-help with videos through how-to communities. One of the big successes during the pilot, which I was hoping for but surprised me nonetheless, was the amount of people who started to self-help and help others. Naturally like every organization, we have a structured help desk department where people phone for technical queries, but what we wanted to introduce was trained people helping each other out on how to make a process more efficient or how to do something. And due to the community nature of Quad we started to see that really hit home.

Persuasion beats pummeling. “Our view of social software is it’s something you don’t want to force people to use. It’s something that they have to see a huge benefit in using themselves and want to use,” says Griffin. This is a view Virgin Media took to heart, so while they ensured executive level buy-in in the person of the company’s chief people officer Elisa Nardi, they also relied on persuasion rather than mandates to drive adoption.

“A lot of our success was involved in the preparations to start with. We completed lots of analysis around who our key collaborators were. We started to look at email stats on who sends lots of emails. We looked externally at who has a lot of followers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, so we could start to see who our collaboration experts are, our super connectors,” says Miles. “We then engaged those first and started to bring them on to the pilot to become evangelists that would shout from the rooftops on how it’s going to change the world, which was really positive. It was a groundswell from bottom up.”

Measure success. “Make sure you have some clear and understood metrics that you can measure from start through the pilot and to the end as well, including surveys, etc.,” Miles stresses. It’s a point Griffin is keen on as well. He recommends, “having a set of goals and measuring how you get towards them. I know it’s a very obvious statement but if you have that, you’re going to be able to measure your success or otherwise and if it’s otherwise, readjust and figure out what needs to change.”

Are there any other keys to a successful roll out of social enterprise tools?

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Virgin Media Slow To Build A Revolution On TiVo

Robert Andrews — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:39:01 +0000

Virgin Media thinks its new-ish TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) set top box is a game changer. But, whilst the new box – with a big PVR drive, capability for over-the-top services and integrated broadcaster catch-up – is a large improvement on its predecessor, one year after launch, some aspects are more evolution than revolution…

Where are the apps?

In a lengthy meeting with City analysts on Wednesday, company executives re-iterated its belief that the box, which is designed to lure Sky customers and head off the emergence of connected TVs, is “an open platform”. But, if Virgin’s TiVo is so “open”, why does it still carry only 15 handpicked “apps”, compared with the 1,000 Samsung Smart Hub has in Europe? That question specifically was asked by an analyst from Cazenove…

“You will see a few apps every month,” he was told by company COO Andrew Barron. “They will be heavyweight apps, not just fodder. It’s easy to publish all sorts of things to it, because it’s got Flash – but we want to the real heavyweights.”

It was a skilled response to what analysts are now realising – Virgin’s TiVo platform is a step-change from its forebear but still a way’s away from rival boxes and TV sets in this regard, and the big-platform-operator way of thinking is notable by its presence.

Virgin claimed viewers called up 2.4 million app sessions in November, spending 21 minutes a time. The showcase apps are iPlayer and Spotify, whose content tends to run long.

iPad controller delayed

For all its advanced additions, the TiVo box, which comes with an additional £5 monthly premium, still does not include basic features of its predecessor like BBC Red Button, which is part and parcel of free-to-air Freeview. Meanwhile, the iPad controller promised pre-launch more than a year ago is still absent. Again, an analyst quizzed Virgin Media on Wednesday.

“We’ve got it, it works,” Barron told him. “Ninety-nine percent of companies would have rolled it by now – it’s stable, impressive – but we haven’t…

“We wanted to make sure early adopter enthusiasts will love it – but that, when it hits, it goes mass-market quite quickly and is not viewed as some flaky application for enthusiasts but is polished and doesn’t generate calls to support. It shows you our philosophy – we’re a mass-market company.”

This is far from the product development method which many developers nowadays favour – ship first, iterate later.

To premium and beyond

If Virgin’s TiVo hasn’t yet got to grips with “open” as many internet afficonados recognise it or with the full-blown revolution in over-the-top connected TV services that is coming in to view, it is, however, ushering in a step change in viewing habits…

Half of viewing on TiVo is now carried out through its My Shows section – that is, shows recorded on its PVR and personalised recommendations. Virgin, whose TV box has three tuners for simultaneous recording as well as broadcaster catch-up services, is spearheading a big rise in timeshifting, now showing 90 million VOD views per month from customers.

It’s a continuation of a trend the previous V+ box, as well as the rise of broadcasters’ own catch-up brands, had created before it. But, if TiVo is still far opening the gates to over-the-top operators in reality, it is proving to be an excellent platform through which to watch VOD on Virgin’s terms.

The company’s strategy is to frog-march customers from Virgin’s existing broadband and TV services to TV upgrades (TiVo) and faster broadband (speeds are being doubled), while continually charging more for the privilege.

It is working – average customer revenue for Virgin’s TiVo customers is £60 per month compared with £45 for regular customers. Virgin’s TiVo adoption doubled in Q4, taking it up to 435,000, it reported on Wednesday.

But Virgin must be mindful that continually ratcheting up price in this way won’t simply turn customers away.

In five years’ time, CEO Neil Berkett told analysts, Virgin will have retired its ghastly old Liberate system, will have all its customers on TiVo and will be scouting for “son of TiVo”.

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Virgin Media Profits As On-Demand Viewing Grows

Robert Andrews — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:58:20 +0000

UK pay-TV and broadband telco Virgin Media clocked its first annual profit in 2011, as its TV set top boxes continued to be an engine of video on-demand viewership.

For the year, the company swung to a £75.9 million net income from a £141.4 million loss a year earlier, as annual revenue rose three percent to £4 billion.

Virgin doubled sign-ups to its new TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) PVR, now at a total 435,000 – but, though it increased its TV subscribe base between October and December, it lost 0.4 percent of its TV subscribers compared with the previous year.

The TiVo box is a big improvement from its predecessor but is still suffering from some quirks, still doesn’t offer some baseline features its predecessor did (like BBC Red Button) and is slow to roll out promised over-the-top services except for Spotify.

Virgin TV customers are now averaging 90 million VOD views per month on their set top boxes through a combination of recordings and hosted on-demand services, exceeding a billion total in 2011 (up 14 percent from 2010).

The company’s strategy is to cater to what it says is growing, voracious demand for digital entertainment and information – in part through its TiVo box and in part by increasing speeds of its broadband service, with which it has a competitive advantage against most copper-wire services by virtue of being fibre optic.

Release.

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First Look: Spotify's TiVo App On Virgin Media UK

Robert Andrews — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 16:16:31 +0000

Virgin Media has finally made live Spotify’s first UK TV app. Virgin Media customers who are Spotify Premium subscribers can access the music service through Virgin’s new TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) set-top box.

The companies have also teamed to offer a six-month grace period on Spotify subscription to Virgin Media customers on particular tiers.

Virgin repeatedly says that it is embracing over-the-top services with its new TiVo box. Whilst the box is impressive, it is also quite slow and those services are confined to formally-struck deals in a distant Apps & Games menu item.

Spotify was already available on TV with Telia in Sweden and recently launched on Boxee. More smart TV and box roll-outs are expected.

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