Virgin Media snub BSkyB peace offer.

hurrah

"Virgin Media customers will remain without shows such as Lost and 24 after the cable group rebuffed a fresh attempt by BSkyB to end the acrimonious row over how much Sky charges for its basic channels.
The BSkyB chief executive, James Murdoch, wrote last week to his counterpart at Virgin Media, Steve Burch, suggesting the companies "meet in the middle", after Sky demanded nearly £10m more than Virgin was willing to pay for channels such as Sky One and Sky News.


Sky's final offer when the two sides were negotiating in February was around £40m a year for its channels, while Virgin refused to pay more than £30m.
Mr Murdoch proposed a deal pitched at around £35m as a "straightforward solution" to break the deadlock that has deprived Virgin's 3.4 million cable TV customers of Sky's basic channels since the beginning of March.

"As you will appreciate, this represents a significant ceding of value to Virgin Media on our part," Mr Murdoch wrote.

However, Mr Burch turned down the proposal, accusing Sky of withdrawing its channels from the cable platform after demanding "an extreme and anti-competitive price"."


http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2083194,00.html

darwin-rover

They were "worth" £25m five years ago , and since then Sky 1 has dropped 7% , so I fail to see how they're worth so much now ?
They keep going on about Lost , but this will be avaliable on the On-Demand service in Sept anyhow . 24 and Lost have dropped viewers quite hard anyhow , even without taking into account the "lost" (pun intended) VM subscribers .

dc

Wow, one of the Murdoch family posting on the wrong board with the wrong facts.

1- They asked for an extra £20m not 10, so lost £20 million instead of gettin £40m good on yer Richard.

2- We used to watch the programmes for free on Ch4

3- Sky is struggling to compete with Freeview

4-Murdoch has lost a mint on his ITV shares which he purchased to prevent Virgin competing with him to buy the next blockbusters, and let us see them for free on ITV. :mad: