Virgin Media customers who take Sky’s sports package are being hit with a £2 a month increase – double the £1 a month hike that Sky’s own subscribers face from June.
Announcing the changes, Virgin Media hit out at the satellite broadcaster, and suggested that it was passing on the costs in a way that was fairer than that chosen by Sky.
Sky announced on 18 March that the price of a sports TV package would rise by £1 a month, while the cost of its popular family bundle, which includes its highest profile shows and access to drama channel Sky Atlantic, is going up by £3 a month.
The news of these rises for Sky’s own customers, which take effect from 1 June, came weeks after the company agreed to pay £4.2bn to show 126 live English Premier League matches a season from 2016 to 2019.
Now Virgin Media – which has 3.8 million TV customers, several hundred thousand of whom take Sky Sports or Movies – has announced that from 1 June, customers who take Sky Sports will pay £2 a month more, while those who have Sky Movies will pay 50p a month more. This will lift the monthly cost of these adds-ons to £29.25 and £15 respectively.
Virgin said these were the only two Sky channels it sold as add-ons, adding: “Sky is spreading the cost across its other TV packages, so their customers who don’t take Sports or Movies will also see the cost of their packages go up … Our rises are simpler and only mean that customers who take the content pay the increased price for that content. We don’t want to make our non-Sky Sports/Movies watching customers subsidise costs for those that do.”
Virgin Media has already complained that the public is paying too much for top-tier football coverage in the UK. It added that when Sky announced its price rises, it was widely recognised by analysts and the media that its non-sport watching customers were subsidising the increasing cost of sports rights.
Brigitte Trafford, Virgin Media’s chief corporate affairs officer, said: “This price rise is entirely due to the increase in charges we have to pay Sky … As we have made clear to Ofcom, any increase in the value of the Premier League’s live TV rights eventually ends up hitting the pockets of fans.”
