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Thursday, February 08, 2007

Uma Thurman fronts Virgin Media launch

Uma Thurman has been confirmed as the face of Virgin Media's multi-million pound launch campaign. The Oscar-nominated actress fronts the television ads for the largest Virgin branded company in the world. The premier of the TV commercial will be broadcast tonight.

Over the course of several different adverts planned for the year Uma persuasively demonstrates the benefits of Virgin Media services. In one of the launch ads, the star will grab viewers' attention by revealing the number for her New York apartment - well almost - showcasing fixed price landline calls to anywhere in the world.

In the first ad to be shown tonight viewers will share an intimate moment with Uma as she unexpectedly pauses for a seductive ten seconds on screen. Not only will this guarantee a captive audience, but the commercial will break new grounds in creative advertising. Viewers will find themselves drawn to the screen as the Hollywood heavyweight silently stares out at living rooms across the country.

Uma's extended pause highlights Virgin Media's TV on demand service which is the largest and most advanced in the UK. Customers can order a programme or film, pause it, rewind it or forward it just as they would a DVD - allowing them to watch what they want, when they want.

Just in case one Uma isn't quite enough, Virgin Media have cloned her in another of the ads. Multiple Umas pop up to demonstrate the company's unlimited and high-speed broadband service.

Uma Thurman joins a legacy of international celebrities such as Kate Moss and Christina Aguilera by starring in a Virgin campaign demonstrating the company's superior access to A list talent.

Virgin Media offers customers an unrivalled range of products through Britain's only 'quadplay' package (TV, broadband, home and mobile phone). With one source for all their entertainment and communication needs, customers can enjoy a simpler, better deal and Virgin Media will set a serious challenge for its competitors. Virgin Media also promises to live up to Virgin's long-established reputation for offering world class customer service, value-for-money and innovation.

James Kydd, Virgin Media's managing director of marketing, said: "We are launching the most inspirational and exciting entertainment and communication company in the UK so it's only fitting that we've got the help of an iconic actress. Uma is renowned for slaying the opposition in Kill Bill and we feel that her involvement perfectly reflects Virgin Media's challenge to its competitors."

The campaign has been created by Rapier. The copywriters were John Townshend, Rapier Creative Partner, Liz Franklin and Jonathan Smith.

The Art Directors were Simon Stephenson and Kevin Howes. The media planning team was Goodstuff with media buying by Manning Gottlieb OMD. The director was Kevin Thomas at Thomas Thomas.

Virgin Media broadband

Labels: virgin-media-broadband

Virgin Media launches

Virgin Media (NASDAQ: VMED), a major new force in entertainment and communications, launched this morning, pledging to shake up the industry and to offer consumers quality, value, innovative products and outstanding customer service.

For the first time, one company will be able to deliver a simple, one-stop solution to meet consumers' entertainment and communications needs, providing cutting-edge digital TV services, unlimited broadband, home phone and a feature-packed mobile service.

Commenting on today's launch, Jim Mooney, chairman said: "Virgin Media will be the UK consumer's company of choice to bring together all of the products, new services and great content, such as Virgin Central, under a totally dedicated and national customer service banner."

A new TV channel with a difference

Virgin Media will launch its most innovative content offer yet in Virgin Central, a blockbuster interactive cable channel, on 20 February. It will herald a new way to watch television, combining the simplicity of a traditional channel with the choice and control of next generation TV-on-demand technology.

Customers will be able to pick and choose from a selection of episodes from hit shows such as The OC, Nip/Tuck, West Wing, Little Britain, Grey's Anatomy, Alias, Criminal Minds, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and CSI: Miami, at any one time for free.

The hybrid service will be available on cable channel 119 and marks a step change in the development of TV-on-demand - making access to a library of additional viewing more exciting and intuitive than ever before.

Virgin Media customers will also be benefiting from even more great content very shortly.

National reach and coming to a store near you Virgin Media also announced plans to extend its reach nationally by rolling services out into non-cable areas in 2007, enabling it to compete on a level playing field with key competitors for the first time ever by reaching over 97% of UK households.

Virgin Media will soon be taking on competitors in the high street too, via a major retail initiative. Fifteen stand alone Virgin Mobile stores offering its unique quadplay of broadband, digital TV, home phone and mobile will open throughout the UK in 2007. This is in addition to existing promotional sites in over 100 of the UK's major shopping centres. The company will also shortly be announcing a major deal to sell its quadplay services in hundreds of high street retail outlets across the UK. In addition, it will sell quadplay in 75 Virgin Mobile concessions in Virgin Megastores.

Simplicity, choice, quality and value

Simplicity and choice are key priorities for Virgin Media. Customers can choose from a range of products on the quadplay menu in clearly priced packages to suit their needs. Virgin Media offers two products for £20, three for £30 and four for £40.

For those who want the best entertainment and communication products money can buy, the company also announced the launch of its 'VIP' (Very Impressive Package) service, offering V+, its HD-enabled PVR; 10Mb broadband; unlimited UK landline calls; and a free TV mobile phone with 500 minutes of mobile airtime per month, 1,000 texts a month and a VIP bonus of £60 free airtime.

As an alternative to Freeview, Virgin Media can also deliver outstanding value to its existing home phone customers with its TV-on-demand service, included in a free TV package. The UK's most extensive TV-on-demand library has more than 500 movie titles and hundreds more comedy shows and TV dramas available 24/7.

Focusing on customer service

Virgin Media is putting customer service at the heart of its business and will make it a key differentiator for consumers. In 2006, it invested £10m (on an annualised basis), hired 300 extra customer service employees, 30 new trainers and reinvigorated its training programmes. Great progress has been made, with 71% of calls now answered within 30 seconds compared to 37% this time last year. And the average speed of answer is now 40 seconds, compared to 176 seconds this time last year. Virgin Media will continue to focus on achieving and maintaining the highest levels of service for all its customers.

Steve Burch, chief executive officer said: "We've been working towards this day for a long time and the transformation of our business is already well advanced. Virgin values are starting to permeate all aspects of our company, from the culture to our product line up. Looking forward, we have a world of opportunity before us. Consumers are ready for something genuinely different. As a company and as individuals, their needs and aspirations will remain at the heart of everything we do."

Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, said: "Today's creation of Virgin Media sees a milestone in the history of the media industry and cable in particular. For the first time there is a single brand set to provide a more extensive range of television entertainment, broadband and communication services than previously offered by anyone in the UK. Our transition to Virgin Media has been underway since last July and will continue over the coming months, as we roll out an outstanding 21st century customer experience in home entertainment and communications."

Virgin Media broadband

Labels: virgin-media-broadband

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Top five ADSL broadband providers

Orange has re-entered the top five ADSL broadband providers in the UK,
joining BT broadband, Pipex broadband, Demon broadband and Virgin.net broadband at the top of the table in terms of technical broadband performance.

The fourth quarter Internet Performance Indicator (IPI) Report from Epitiro – the UK’s leading Customer Experience Management (CEM) provider for Internet access services – identifies BT as the best performing broadband provider. BT have held the top position for the last three quarters.

Epitiro’s customer experience monitoring and competitor benchmarking service, monitored the services from the ten largest competing consumer ADSL broadband providers, collecting 622,147 real-time data samples from eleven locations around the UK. This means that from 1st October to 31st December 2006, each broadband service was tested over 60,000 times on average.

“Our testing has shown that in terms of technical performance, BT and Pipex are still maintaining their position in the top five,” said Gavin Johns, Managing Director of Epitiro.

Overall Ranking - Q4 2006
1 - BT broadband
2 - Pipex broadband
3 - Orange broadband
4 - Demon broadband
5 - Virgin broadband

Increasing Speed Through 2006

Epitiro’s research has found that the industry average connection and HTTP download (web browsing) speeds have increased steadily through 2006, with the average consumer ADSL connection speed for the fourth quarter at 5.73 Mbps per second.

“ISPs are increasing their speeds, which is good news for bandwidth-hungry users,” said Epitiro’s Gavin Johns. “Speeds have increased from 3.82 Mbps per second in the third quarter due to new ADSL Max entrants into the ten largest broadband providers. However it’s unlikely that many ADSL Max services will perform at their full capacity of 8Mbps. The speed of broadband service reduces the further the customer’s connection is from their local telephone exchange.”

Individual Category Rankings

Epitiro’s Consumer ADSL IPI Report measures ten performance metrics, averaging performance in each to compile the top five rankings. Plusnet achieved the highest connection speed for the second quarter running. BT offered the fastest HTTP download speed, which normally reflects the speed of general web browsing. BT also provided the fastest FTP downloads from users’ personal webspace. Pipex
provided the fastest FTP upload speed. As well as upload and download connection speeds, ISP-I measures connection reliability and time to connect to ensure the full customer experience is captured.

“A broadband connection isn’t just about speed,” explained Gavin Johns. “The
connection has to be available when you need it and, with the growth of VoIP, Internet gaming and videoconferencing, it has to be able to deal with lots of different online activities.”

Virgin’s services had the lowest packet loss rate. All ISPs experience some packet loss, but a high rate of loss can lead to problems streaming video and audio. Interestingly, the percentage of packet loss - whilst remaining low - more than doubled in the past quarter. Virgin also had the lowest percentage of connection failures in Q4, suggesting that their consumer ADSL customers had the highest degree of uptime of the sample group. Orange broadband provided the fastest ping time, generally desirable to users that require frequent data updates from the Internet back to their computer, such as online gamers.

Labels: bt-broadband, general-broadband-news, orange-broadband, pipex-broadband, plusnet-broadband, virgin-broadband, virgin-media-broadband

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Virgin Media honesty over past customer service

According to the Telegraph, Virgin Media's head of internal communications, James Weekly, offered some brutally honest perspectives of past customer service to fellow internal communications professionals at the Royal Society of Arts this month.

With particular reference to NTL, Mr Weekly referred to the previously poor customer service and other challenges faced by Virgin Media since a complex merger of NTL and Telewest, under the Virgin brand. His frank references were of a history of "crap service" and "very tired people", along with a "synergy hell", caused by ongoing staff reductions of 6,000.

A spokesman for Virgin Media offered the following comments:

"This shows a brutal honesty about what happened before and the challenges that lie ahead.

"The perception is that a Virgin company generally sails along with no problems at all but becoming a Virgin company isn't easy.

"You can't just stamp Virgin on it and everything suddenly goes well. You are overlaying a very entrepreneurial risqué culture on to what was essentially a utility."

For Virgin Media, these disclosures come at a sensitive time, ahead of their £20m marketing relaunch of NTL as Virgin Media.

Virgin Media

Labels: ntl-broadband, telewest-broadband, virgin-broadband, virgin-media-broadband

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Virgin Media soon to launch

Aligning the services of NTL, Telewest and Virgin.net, Virgin Media will soon launch, bringing their respective TV, broadband, mobile and telephony services under the combined Virgin Media brand. A flavour of the new suite of Virgin Media services is available via a sneak preview PR site - www.knowfirst.co.uk, along with the opportunity to win one of 10 invites to their 'glitzy star-studded' party to celebrate the launch of Virgin Media.

According to this site, it would seem that Virgin Media will launch with a choice of three packages - Medium Virgin TV (incl. 2Mb broadband), Large Virgin TV (incl. 4Mb broadband) and XLarge Virgin TV (incl. 10Mb broadband), each with progssively more TV channels (129 TV channels with XLarge) and an inclusive phone line bundled in with the price. Exclusive content worth £35 per month and he peace of mind of Internet security (PC Guard) is to be included with the Large Virgin and XLarge Virgin packages. It is not clear from KnowFirst.co.uk exactly how the telephone element of each package will work, aside from mention that Virgin Phone services will range from Talk Weekends to Talk Unlimited.

Labels: ntl-broadband, ntl-telewest-broadband, telewest-broadband, virgin-broadband, virgin-media-broadband

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UK broadband service news

Uma Thurman fronts Virgin Media launch

Virgin Media launches

Top five ADSL broadband providers

Virgin Media honesty over past customer service

Virgin Media soon to launch