Virgin Media joins the Netflix bonanza

Virgin Media is the latest telco to cash in on the aggregator trend, building on a partnership with Netflix to allow customers to pay for the streaming service through their Virgin Media bill.

Starting in October, builds on a partnership dating back to 2013, with Virgin Media claiming more than 700 million hours of programming have been watched through the Netflix app on Virgin TV’s platform. The team might be stating it was the first to lure the Netflix goldmine onto its platform, but it has turned into a fast-follower when it comes to integrating bills, after similar announcements from BT and Telefonica in recent weeks.

“Virgin TV has always been about giving our customers the TV they love all in one place,” said Jeff Dodds, MD of Consumer and Mobile at Virgin Media. “We were the first to embrace this open philosophy by embedding Netflix into our platform back in 2013 and it’s clearly something that our customers absolutely love. By expanding our relationship further we’re forming an even deeper relationship with our friends at Netflix and giving our customers a simpler way to pay for the service.”

Such partnerships are likely to become much more common as the telcos search for the much-hyped convergence business model. Content is seemingly a critical factor of this business, though attempting to compete with the traditional players in the content market by owning rights and distribution deals is a treacherous path; just ask the BT consumer business. Instead, providing a channel to the consumer, a content aggregator, is becoming a more popular idea.

As one of the most, or arguably the most, popular content streaming business on the planet, integrating the service into the media platform is a very sensible idea. It answers a frustration of the consumer, the increasingly fragmented distribution of content across different platforms, while also adding to the Virgin Media content experience, which could be deemed average at best. The more partners telcos like Virgin Media add into the mix, the more engaging the content platform will become, which in turn should reduce customer churn year-on-year.

The key word here is scale, as quality is unlikely to be a differentiator over the coming years. We suspect all major telcos with a content platform will have similar partnerships with the likes of Netflix before too long, therefore the differentiating factor for customers when choosing a telco will be simplicity. The more partners mean more bills which can be streamlined into one place. Unfortunately providing adequate breadth for the content platform will need a considerable amount of leg-work; it will be a long slog, but the rewards of the convergence business model are already beginning to become apparent for companies like Orange and Sky.