Sky hitting back at VirginMedia

Posted by: Marketing Guy Date posted: March 9th, 2007 Published in: Marketing, Public Relations, Viral Marketing

Well more drama in the Sky v VirginMedia battle - Sky have launched a new ad campaign commenting that VirginMedia have “dropped” Sky channels.  Check out this page encouraging users to switch over.

“VirginMedia, (formerly ntl:telewest) are doubting the value of TV you love and have dropped Sky One, Sky News and Sky Travel.  We want VirginMedia to keep these channels on air so call them if you want you do too.”

Do these companies really think consumers are so bloody stupid?  I confess, I like VirginMedia’s response and I accept Sky’s response as being fairly acceptable in terms of corporate marketing, but come on!

Is there really any individual in the UK that seriously believes that Virgin just turned around and said, “nah we don’t need ya!”.  Nope.

Fair play to BSkyB for taking advantage of the situation - clearly two very savvy marketing teams are at war here and personally I find it pretty damn exciting to see who will prevail!

It will be interesting to see how far these companies would go to get the competitive edge over each other.  Sure the long term war for the cable market may not be won anytime soon, but this short term battle is far from over and certainly the victor will reap significant rewards.  I think this is worth spending some time researching! ;)

More info here.

MG

On a side note, I think it’s pretty unethical advertising on Sky’s part - they are advertising a “switch over” from cable for only £15, but as we all know cable comes part and parcel with phone service and broadband and to get BT to install / set you up you are looking at a few hundred quid.

And for any gamers out there (or anyone who needs “always on”) broadband - BT sucks ass - they always disconnect you - got loads of mates who bitch about BT all the time.

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Comments

  1. Posted by: John Fry Date posted: 21st March, 2007 at 7:34 pm

    I am sure that Sky’s price increace to Virgin Media is preditory pricing. They are using their dominence in the pay tv market to try and put a competitor out of business. I am suprised that this matter has not been reported to the Office of Fair Trading rather than Offcom.

  2. Posted by: geoff Date posted: 9th April, 2007 at 12:31 pm

    sky is a big wouldnt you do the same to cover you ass

  3. Posted by: bill bailey Date posted: 3rd May, 2007 at 1:03 pm

    I’m fed up with both of them. Has anyone else noticed how poor the service from virgin is? I’ve emailed them twice with complaints and have received no reply so Im going to make do with freeview and tell them to stick it. I’ll also save shed loads

  4. Posted by: Marketing Guy Date posted: 3rd May, 2007 at 1:26 pm

    Well I’ve stayed with Virginmedia (as a Telewest client) and haven’t found the phone support too bad. Their “on demand” service that offered TV, movies, etc via their interactive service was a bit bugged for the first few weeks after the merger, but it works well now - loads of great stuff too (first 2 series of Peep Show, Derren Brown, Red Dwarf, etc).

    In my experience, email support from big companies tends to be shit anyway! :) I always go for phone support.

    Scott

  5. Posted by: Chris Date posted: 17th May, 2007 at 2:59 pm

    Hi MG,

    I was really miffed because I lost some channels I liked and now - I don’t miss them, I watch less TV and Sky’s advertisers can’t get to me so their loss.

    But… We noticed a much more critical issue from a marketing point of view. On one of the email campaigns we run, a significant amount of emails bounced back - where from? ***@ntlworld.com etc!!! These guys had a bun fight and suddenly - my clients cannot reach their subscribed user-base as the customers had moved on losing the email address. Sure next time they buy they MIGHT re-register for the newsletter but it looks like a snail-mail exercise and even then it’s not guaranteed they’ll sign-up again.

    Chris

    p.s. in general I’ve found NTL/Virgin to be a good service.

  6. Posted by: Marketing Guy Date posted: 17th May, 2007 at 3:02 pm

    Hi Chris

    Yeh the VM changeover seems to be a little shakey right now. I’m on Telewest in Edinburgh and the TV is on and off from times (but otherwise works pretty well - the on demand stuff was slow at first but they fixed that).

    I also spoke with a mate on the World of Warcraft server team and they said they are having loads of issues with VirginMedia customers - apparently VM are doing a huge overhaul of their network which causes a few problems with stuff using uncommon ports.

    Hopefully it’s just a transission phase! :)

    And I still get my Lost fix each week (thank you bit torrent!).

    MG

  7. Posted by: james smith Date posted: 8th September, 2007 at 8:05 am

    this story is true and someone better do somethink about this tv fraud has been going on for some time now many people out there i have been trying to contact virginmedia