Virgin Media posts another quarterly loss

Cabler's net losses narrow to $202.5 mil

By Mimi Turner
LONDON -- Virgin Media, the U.K.'s biggest cable company, posted its 11th consecutive quarterly loss for its first fiscal quarter of 2008, reporting that net losses narrowed to 104 million pounds ($202.5 million) from 120 million pounds a year ago on revenue down 2% at 1 billion pounds ($1.95 billion).

Virgin added 36,800 new TV customers in the first three months of the year. Recently appointed chief executive Neil Berkett said customer numbers were up and that he had reopened talks with satcaster BSkyB to end a bruising channel dispute that has seen Virgin Media customers quit the platform in droves.

Berkett confirmed that carriage talks for a raft of channels including Sky One and Sky News had been held and signaled optimism that a deal with new BSkyB CEO Jeremy Darroch could be done.

"It's fair to say that with a change at the top of both organizations, there is a dialogue and there's no sort of emotional legacy that would hold us back," he said.

Virgin Media posts another quarterly loss

Cabler's net losses narrow to $202.5 mil

By Mimi Turner
LONDON -- Virgin Media, the U.K.'s biggest cable company, posted its 11th consecutive quarterly loss for its first fiscal quarter of 2008, reporting that net losses narrowed to 104 million pounds ($202.5 million) from 120 million pounds a year ago on revenue down 2% at 1 billion pounds ($1.95 billion).

Virgin added 36,800 new TV customers in the first three months of the year. Recently appointed chief executive Neil Berkett said customer numbers were up and that he had reopened talks with satcaster BSkyB to end a bruising channel dispute that has seen Virgin Media customers quit the platform in droves.

Berkett confirmed that carriage talks for a raft of channels including Sky One and Sky News had been held and signaled optimism that a deal with new BSkyB CEO Jeremy Darroch could be done.

"It's fair to say that with a change at the top of both organizations, there is a dialogue and there's no sort of emotional legacy that would hold us back," he said.

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DENVER -- New figures from NPD Group suggest that the Amazon DRM-free digital music service is doing more to grow the overall digital music market as opposed to simply stealing customers from iTunes.

The research group says only 10% of Amazon customers had previously bought music from Apple's iTunes service. While many tagged the Amazon service as an "iTunes killer" when it first launched, the music industry's hope all along was never to cannibalize iTunes sales but rather encourage new digital buyers. NPD's data suggest exactly that is happening.

"The fact that Amazon's early growth does not appear to be at the expense of Apple iTunes is a healthy indication that the digital music customer pool can expand into new consumer groups who have not yet joined the iTunes community," said NPD analyst Russ Crupnick in a statement.

NPD says Amazon is now second only to iTunes in the a la carte digital download category (for those keeping score). The company did not disclose how many users Amazon has attracted in total, however it did say iTunes volume is 10 times that of Amazon.

Some interesting demographic breakdown has emerged between the two services as well. NPD says 84% of Amazon customers are male, compared to 44% of iTunes, but only 3% of Amazon customers were teens, compared to iTunes' 18% (the latter attributed primarily to the popularity of iTunes gift cards.)

NPD says Amazon's growth is likely more due to existing Amazon customers adopting the new service rather than due its lower pricing or DRM-free policies.

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