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Your advert here!!! Technical Editors:
Last modified: |
Selling four services for a mere
£30 per month doesn't seem to be
working for the new Virgin
Media. The company was formed by
merging NTL with Virgin Mobile.
Although it's still the largest
MVNO in the UK with 4.7 million
customers, Virgin lost a total
of 61,300 customers in Q1 2007.
Part of the reason could be
Virgin's new concentration on
acquiring contract customers
instead of its traditional base
- prepaid customers.
Significantly part of the
fourplay offering is to sign
customers up to Virgin Mobile on
contract for £10 per month. Virgin Media's TV services
aren't doing much better either.
The company expects to see a net
loss of customers due to the
fiasco over the loss of BSkyB
customers. At the height of this
debacle, Virgin Media's call
centre was receiving over
120,000 calls per week from
customers complaining about the
loss. Hence Virgin Media got itself
into a vicious circle whereby
new customers couldn't sign up
for its fourplay offering
because existing customers were
jamming its call centre. At one point in time the call
centre was playing a message
which told callers they were
valued but they were probably
going to have to wait for 20
minutes to speak to an agent.
Against this background BT
has decided it wants to break
into the pay TV market with its
BT Vision offering. What BT is
offering is the V-box which is a
Freeview receiver coupled with a
digital programme recorder. Given that the price for such
devices is dropping rapidly,
BT's installation and set up fee
of £90 is looking less and less
attractive. Especially since you
have to install BT's own
broadband network in order to
download videos across the Net. Given that the competition
not only includes Virgin Media
but also the Carphone Warehouse
and BSkyB, BT's goal of hundreds
of thousands customer within 12
months is looking very
challenging indeed.
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