In a somewhat expected move a deal has been announced that will consolidate Liberty Global's content delivery platform in the UK.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21347814US billionaire John Malone's cable group, Liberty Global, has agreed to buy the UK's Virgin Media in a cash and stock deal worth $23.3bn (£15bn). It will create the UK's second biggest pay-TV business after BSkyB.
The deal, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval, puts Mr Malone in direct competition with Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire owns 39% of BSkyB. Liberty Global already has operations in various European countries including Germany and Belgium.
"Adding Virgin Media to our large and growing European operations is a natural extension of the value creation strategy we've been successfully using for over seven years," said Mike Fries, chief executive of Liberty Global.
Some of you like myself may ask whats this term "Value creation strategy" ?
This seems to be a new way of describing customers of a companies pay to view offerings that many companies offer on top of their ISP offerings, its always a worry when an ISP also has such traffic passing across its network as there is a serious conflict of interest between its basic ISP subscribers and the underhand usage of deep packet inspection (throttling) equipment to give priority to its content delivery platform customers I would be very interested to know if anyone even gathered data on such things let alone made it public, as usual the industry regulator OFCOM will sit on their thumbs and not ask, as that's basically what they do best.
