The Virgin Media Television thread

I've just read a very surprising proposal via Digital Spy this morning from Chris Choi who is the Consumer Editor of ITV News in the UK.

Apparently when Chris Choi was in an interview with Talksport recently; he said there is a proposal for the ITV National Evening News with Mary Nightingale to be turned into an hour long bulletin which will start at 6:30pm every weeknight with it ending at 7:30pm. The idea of it is to make the last half hour of this bulletin a magazine/discussion style news format which makes it compete with The One Show slot on BBC One in the UK.

The ITV regional news in the UK including UTV Live from Belfast will still go out at 6pm.

Emmerdale could actually be shown at 7:30 on ITV. Coronation Street could be shown as an hour long episode on Monday, Wednesday & Friday nights.

5 News on Channel 5 in the UK have already made their weekday news bulletin an hour long bulletin very recently. They have two female presenters as the main host of the bulletin. The format of it is very similar to ITV's new proposal for the Evening News.

I don't know how this would implicate broadcasts of Emmerdale & Coronation Street on VMTV's channels here. I would suspect that this type of development could have very big implications for VM subscribers here if they cannot have the option to watch these soaps at their original timeslot especially when trying to reschedule these programmes on their 3 main channels.

How could VM do that so easily when they show VM News at 8 on VM One. You need to have good back-up plans in place to mitigate these issues when VM has the official non exclusive broadcast rights to a lot of the UEFA matches here as well.

This move by ITV News could place an indirect hit to the schedule for EastEnders which is shown on RTÉ One here & BBC One in the UK. It could be placed on an earlier time slot if the proposed move from ITV News goes ahead as planned.

If this proposal from ITV News was true. Could you consider it to be a very easy or hard move think about for VM in Ireland?

EDIT: Sorry for providing the awful sound on that link in my post. I found it on Digital Spy this morning. I couldn't find a better quality audio link available.

I wonder what Virgin Media will do? Will they ignore ITV’s changes and stick to their own schedule? Or will they move the News at 8 to 7 perhaps? Alternatively would they scrap the News at 8 entirely or move it to Virgin Media 2 as they have done occasionally in the past?

Which VM channel is showing this year's Brit Awards.

It really depends on if the 5:30 news and the six o'clock show can retain an audience to 7pm for the news.

RTÉ's nationwide programme could do well with this move, though virgin media might look at when TSOCS starts at 18:30 it always gets a higher audience (though in the past this has been only a 30min show rather than the full hour).

UTV Ireland never really secured an audience before Emmerdale for its 6:30 news so I can't see audiences tuning to Virgin Media in high numbers for either the return of the 7 O'Clock News or a later TSOCS.

What you mean C6/3E/VM2 have stopped focusing on the core 15 to 35 (shhhh their PR people will be after you :) )

No is the simple answer but both VM2 and VM3 are anomalies, VM2 gets an audience share of 3.5%, while VM3 gets 2.5%, they are the most watch extra channels on TV, not even in the UK does ITV3 command that size of audience in the UK 1.85% in the last 4 weeks. VM2 and 3 are essentially getting 5 to 6% share of the audience while re-broadcasting programming on ITV3! I don't think very many UK "digital" channels get to even 2%.

Ant & Decs limitless win is on RTÉ tonight. Thought virgin media would have had the rights to that if they wanted it

I'd love to know who the distributor is, BBC Studios? Should be left to VMTV to pick up, no reason for RTÉ to have this show, it will be pitted against Saturday Night Takeaway next week!

Saturday Night Takeaway airs from 7-8.30, so there may be a few minutes where they may clash - depending on the length of the Saturday film on RTE1.

EastEnders moving to 7:30 Monday - Thursday, against Emmerdale. Not great for RTÉ as Emmerdale often outperforms EastEnders, and has pretty much seen the same kind of audience for TV3/VMTV one for the past 20 years.

Where does that leave Fair City? 8pm Tuesday - Thursday and Sunday (8:30 on Sunday during DWTS season). Clashing with Coro Street on Wednesday.

I assume both RTÉ and VMTV will follow the new schedules from BBC and ITV.

BBC have announced that from 7th March EastEnders will air Monday to Thursday at 7:30, nothing stopping RTÉ keeping the currently schedule. But Monday and Friday will clash with Coro St and they'd be an ep behind on Thursday and Friday nights.