Virgin Media have "underestimated" the value its customers place on the basic BSkyB channels that the cable TV company have lost because of their spat with the satellite broadcaster. Not my opinion, I should add, but the opinion of investment bank UBS, based in part on a survey of 1000 families by research types GfK. The bank says it reckons the cable network could lose up to 400,000 subscribers because of the loss of channels like Sky One and all those classic shows it carries like Mile High, Sex On The Beach and When Sport Stars See Red (oh, and a couple of American programmes too I think).
The conclusion comes in a UBS survey on the current and future state of the multi-channel TV market. They reckon that, despite taking the Virgin brand since their merger with Virgin Mobile, the company that was NTL/Telewest is still not especially attractive to consumers. Sky subscribers, they say, don't see switching to Virgin as a viable alternative; existing Virgin customers are very likely to switch if the BSkyB/Virgin spat continues too much longer; and Virgin will take another hammering if OfCom allow Sky to put pay to view channels onto the Freeview network (which UBS reckon they will). None of which makes great reading for Virgin Media types.
Whether that makes the phone/internet/mobile/cable company more or less prone to takeover (you'll remember there were talks of takeover last week) I don't know. But the UBS report will make happy reading over a Sky towers. They too are suffering from their spat with Virgin because the audience on their mainstream channels is down which will affect the advertising rates they can charge. But with reports like this one they'll be further motivated to weather that storm, increasingly confident that Virgin will, eventually, have to cave in and pay the asking price for the Sky channels. Because there is only so long the average cable viewer will wait for the latest edition of When Sport Stars See Red before they, well, turn red. Or, rather, switch to blue.