Virgin hails the connected TV bump

Virgin Media yesterday hailed the popularity of its connected television service TiVo and said it planned to bring it to all of its customers, as it unveiled solid quarterly results.

The cable group quadrupled the number of customers taking TiVo in the third quarter, bringing the total to 222,000. It announced the service in December last year.

Eamonn O'Hare, the financial director of Virgin, said: "We've had a fast start. About 5 per cent of our customers now have the TiVo box, and we plan to get that to all of them."

He also revealed that more details of the company's deal with Spotify, the music streaming service, would be revealed next month.

Virgin posted a 2.2 per cent growth in revenue in the three months to the end of September. Revenue reached £1bn as the average amount paid by customer rose 3.2 per cent to £47.86 a month. The group also added a further 6,300 customers during the quarter.

Mr O'Hare added that customers were increasingly choosing superfast broadband, with more than half of all new customers choosing 30Mb packages or faster. These results "may challenge Sky's assumptions that there is no demand for superfast broadband," Ian Whittaker, an analyst at Liberum Capital, said.

"The current economic climate is really tough and we don't see it getting any better in the short term," Mr O'Hare said. "But our business model is proving really resilient."