Netflix Offered By Virgin Media UK Pay-TV Provider

Virgin Media is a pay television provider in the UK and it and Netflix have announced an industry first. Netflix is now being offered to Virgin Media subscribers marking the first time that a Web-delivered product has been integrated by a major pay-TV provider. Virgin Media plans to begin testing Netflix with 40,000 its customers who use TiVo set-top boxes.

The pay-TV network isn't offering free subscriptions to Netflix for its customers, the customer will still have to pay their own subscription. The service will begin testing with about 40,000 Virgin Media cable customers who currently use the TiVo set-top box. All 1.7 million TiVo set-top box users will have the opportunity to access Netflix this year.

The agreement between Netflix and Virgin Media is the first time over the top services like Netflix have been merged with pay-TV offerings. Virgin Media currently has 3.77 million customers in the UK and 44% of those customers use the TiVo boxes. All of those TiVo box using customers will have the chance to use Netflix eventually.

Customers using that set-top box with Virgin Media will now be able to search on a single screen for content across pay-TV, online subscription services, and on-demand sites. That means the search for an actor like Kevin Spacey would bring up any movies airing on the cable networks as well as House of Cards, which is a Netflix original program.

SOURCE: Bloomberg