Virgin Media: our customers back us

Virgin Media has responded to Sky's attempts to tempt customers away from its services by announcing a major movie promotion.

Though details of the promotion have not been released yet, it appears to be a move to placate its customers who are angry about the loss of channels such as Sky One. However, Virgin Media has said in a statment today that it would not stand in the way of customers who want to switch to Sky.

Steve Burch, chief executive of Virgin Media said: "Virgin Media wants to do the right thing by its customers and resolve this dispute, as well as its underlying causes. Over the next month... we will not use technical legalities to stand in the way of them switching to another service.

However, Burch believes that Virgin Media's customers and the public support its decision to stand up to Sky.

"Among both our customers and the public as a whole, we believe there is a significant groundswell of support for our decision to stand up to Sky: we are determined to ensure it is the customer that benefits from our determination to do so," Burch said.

A poll of visitors to www.webuser.co.uk would seem to support this view, with 59 per cent of respondents blaming Sky for the dispute, and 27 per cent blaming Virgin Media.

Virgin Media also welcomed comments from the National Consumer Council concerning competition in the digital TV market in the UK.

We strongly agree with the NCC - there are flaws in the UK pay TV market which are harming the interests of consumers and an investigation is warranted. As we have said repeatedly this week, anything that will shed daylight on these problems and our recent dispute with Sky is welcomed by us," the company said in a statement.

http://www.virginmedia.com/
http://www.sky.com/
http://www.ncc.org.uk/

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