For Broadcast February 13, 2008

To be content-led or not to be content-led? That was the question for Virgin Media's acting chief executive, Neil Berkett, but he seemed to answer it quite definitively last week when he said that the cable company, which less than 18 months ago made a bid for ITV, is now a "broadband-led" organisation.

Berkett called the ITV bid (which was thwarted when Sky bought a 17.9% stake in ITV) "a moment in time". Berkett's decision to stop focusing on premium content either looks like a brilliant sucker punch to its main competitor Sky, or a bowing to the reality that VM can't win the content game.

It's a bit of a belated realisation. Sky has held the premium content juggernaut for years. Cable has always had a superior two-way network but it seems it has taken a man from outside the media business to connect the dots and decide to focus on super-fast broadband.

But can technology alone beat live Premier League football, Hollywood movies and whatever else it is that people want to watch? Berkett admits that VM must "control its destiny" as regards content and he does have a strategy for what he calls "medium tier" content such as UKTV and its newly launched Virgin 1 channel. Controlling the presentation and delivery speed of this content, and the applications around it, is the new USP of VM.

The question now is will smart speedy pipes be enough? Sky is no longer simply a premium pay-TV company. It too has seen the potential of broadband and is not going to shoot for second place.