Hostilities between Sky and Virgin have intensified during the course of cable’s re-launch, Sky’s announcement of its pay-DTT plans, and bilateral negotiations over channel carriage fee payments on the satellite and cable platforms

International subsidiaries continue to perform solidly 

NTL’s acquisition of Virgin Mobile will improve NTL’s prospects for revenue growth and enable it to exploit the Virgin brand and marketing expertise 

C&W UK’s new Chairman John Pluthero’s turnaround strategy involves shedding 27,000 business customers and focusing on 800 of the largest accounts

Viability is a major concern. Although the Freeview channels and much of the on-demand content will be free, subscriber acquisition costs probably will exceed £200, while per subscriber on-demand revenues are unlikely to amount to much more than £1 or £2 per month 

C&W UK has warned of a sharp drop in organic EBITDA for C&W UK in 2006/07

The main underlying culprit was churn; as we predicted, this has risen as the subscriber base matures, choking off subscriber growth and increasing costs