Virgin Media, Inc. (VMED) is a telecommunications firm that sells cable television, high speed internet, land line and mobile phone service in the United Kingdom. Virgin Media is the only cable provider currently operating in the UK, and it served 3.5 million customers in 2006 (about 27% of the UK's total pay-TV market). Virgin is the first British firm to use a bundling strategy, offering television, phone, and internet service in one discounted package. This strategy boosted revenues for cable firms in the United States, notably Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (TWC), but it has only recently gained traction in the UK. Virgin Media remains the only British firm that can offer a quadruple play of pay-TV, Broadband Technologies , Fixed-line telecommunication , and mobile phone service to its customers.

Despite these advantages, and average revenues of £1 billion in each quarter from June 2006 to June 2007, the company lost money in 2006 and has been losing customers. Financial losses are partially a result of high overhead costs from the company's recent acquisitions - the merger of ntl and Telewest in 2005, and the purchase of Virgin Mobile in 2006 that allowed the firm to expand into cellular phone service while securing the rights to the Virgin brand name for the next 30 years. A more significant factor, however, is the number of customers that Virgin Media has been losing to British Sky Broadcasting Group (BSY), a result of the fact that that BskyB has exclusive rights to some premium content, including many sports matches, that Virgin cannot broadcast.

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