Virgin Media And Sky Battle Over Licensing Fees

Sky has threatened to pull its major channels from Virgin Media as they have failed to reach an agreement on how much Virgin Media would pay for the basic channels Sky One, Two, Three, News, Sports and News, reports C21 Media. Virgin Media (which covers mobile, phone, broadband and digital TV) claims that Sky has “demanded a carriage fee more than double the exiting arrangement”, and that “this outcome has been deliberately engineered by Sky in order to suppress competition and coerce Virgin Media customers into switching to its service by denying them access to the basic channels”. I’m not sure how much of this is mobile vs digital TV, but as Virgin Media is a quad-play I’m guessing they’re all interconnected in some way. Virgin Media came out with a lot of stuff about uncompetitive behaviour, but if Sky is offering a directly competing product I can see why they may not want other’s to carry their content.

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