As you no doubt saw, NTL formally relaunched as Virgin Media yesterday following the merger last year of the cable company with Virgin Mobile (and, just prior to that, main rival Telewest). Although it was really NTL who took over Virgin Mobile, the new company will be known as Virgin Media, and the Virgin Group has maintained a share, which means they can roll out Richard Branson to witter on about "quad play", and integrated broadcast telco solution thingimies, and about how evil Sky are.
NTL's relaunch and rebrand is very much about trying to take on their long term big boy competitors, with hopes that the Virgin brand will help them steal customers off the satellite firm. I'm not entirely convinced the Virgin brand is quite as attractive as it once was, but it might work.
Sky, for their part, tried to steal the news agenda on the day of Virgin Media's launch by announcing plans to make new Sky pay-tv channels, including premium content like flagship US imports and premiere league football, available via terrestrial digital. Sky will replace its current crappy free to air Freeview channels (Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Three) with the pay-to-view premium content, though terrestrial digital viewers will have to buy a new set top box to access them. The whole plan is also subject OfCom approval.