The waiting game

Logically speaking, BSkyB ought to seriously consider the National Consumer Council's plea for a temporary deal allowing the return of the basic Sky channels to the Virgin Media cable service, but from recent events it seems that BSkyB considers Virgin Media to be far too much of a commercial threat even in the short term to allow that to happen.

And I suspect that the NCC's pleas for Sky to stop its Virgin Media customer poaching tactics will fall on deaf ears as well; indeed recently I noticed a van parked in a shopping centre that was predominantly painted dark red (Virgin Media's brand colour), but closer inspection of the vehicle revealed a Sky logo and a special offer for new customers of its HD service.

That sort of tactic is analogous to the Vodafone mobile phone network painting its promotional vehicles orange, which illustrates just how far Sky is prepared to go in order to derail Virgin Media. In theory BSkyB ought to be cautious at this point, but still seems to think that nobody will be brave enough to take a regulatory stand against them.

However it's not all good news for Sky; the Ofcom inquiry into the pay-TV industry could seriously delay Sky's planned terrestrial pay-TV service, which helps to damage its future prospects along with the ability to dent Setanta and BT Vision's subscriber numbers.

But the fact that this service still has the potential to exist may be enough of a threat in itself; indeed it's a bigger threat for BT Vision - whose package was aided by the inclusion of Sky Three/News/Sports News on Freeview - compared to Setanta who is just offering exclusive Premiership sports coverage via Top Up TV.

BSkyB's weakness at this point of time is that it is facing new competition simultaneously from more than one source, and dealing with this competition in the traditional Sky way (ie. throwing its weight around) may this time not produce the results it initially expected.

What will be interesting is exactly how many Virgin Media customers will be lured by Sky's tactics, therefore the next set of subscriber number statistics revealed by Sky will be of much greater interest than usual, though a lower than expected increase in Sky subscriptions could result in not just Virgin seeing red.