UKTV is one of those jewels in the channel landscape that goes under the radar. But after the recent ratings success of renaming the lacklustre UKTV G2 as the more viewer-friendly Dave, and with 50% shareholder Virgin Media TV talking about scaling back its content business, questions are being asked again about its ownership.

Dave is bringing in more than triple the audience of its predecessor with very little change to the programming line-up, which shows how important branding and marketing can be in a fragmented TV landscape.

A large part of the upturn has to do with it being moved onto Freeview, but even in pay homes the boys channel now has significantly higher audiences.

In normal circumstances UKTV's 33 -million viewers a month would be good news for valuation, particularly with the prospect that its management could "do a Dave" on its other eight channels. However, the UKTV joint-venture has special -considerations that seem to limit a potentially -premium valuation.

Originally set up as a 30-year joint-venture, UKTV is split evenly between its two owners, BBC Worldwide and Virgin Media (which inherited its stake from Flextech). Under the deal, VM supplies its cable platform for distribution and the BBC supplies its programmes. But while the deal does cover channel-related websites such as uktvfood.co.uk it doesn't cover VoD - it's a linear channel deal.

At the moment, VM has a carrying value on its balance sheet for its 50% of UKTV of £370m, which includes a related loan to the channel. If BBCW has a similar value on the venture then it is worth £740m. Not bad but certainly not as high a value as it would be if a 360-degree approach to the channels' exploitation across multiple platforms all fed back into the joint-venture. "It's a 180 model in a 360 world," says one financier.

Nevertheless, if VM wants to sell, it may have a buyer waiting. BBCW has spent recent weeks talking to private equity firms about securing a bigger acquisitions war chest and one of its aims is understood to be gaining control of the whole of UKTV to better exploit the 360 rights for the corporation's content.

A deal might be hard to pull off without BBCW also bidding for Virgin Media TV (the two broadcasters cross-sell advertising), hence the need for the private equity boys to get involved. Last time there was interest in UKTV and VMTV the price was up above £1bn. Perhaps UKTV doesn't have valuation -problems after all.