Virgin Media 2008 Annual Report Download - page 10

We are incorporated in the State of Delaware, United States. Our principal executive office is
located at 909 Third Avenue, Suite 2863, New York, New York 10022, United States, and our
telephone number is [phone]. Our U.K. headquarters are located outside of London, England in
Hook, Hampshire. Our annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports
on Form 8-K, and any amendments thereto, are available free of charge on our website at
www.virginmedia.com, as soon as reasonably practicable after they are filed with, or furnished to, the
Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC. The investor relations section of our website can be
accessed under the heading ‘‘About Virgin Media—Investors Information’’. The information on our
website is not incorporated by reference into this annual report.
Our Business
Cable Segment
In our Cable segment, we provide our services to residential consumers and business customers.
Consumer
We provide broadband internet, television and fixed line telephone services under the Virgin
Media brand to residential customers in the U.K. Our services are distributed principally via our
wholly-owned, cabled, local access communications network and are available to an addressable market
of approximately 12.6 million homes. The network covers parts of many major metropolitan areas in
England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. In addition, we provide broadband and telephone
services to residential customers outside of our cable network via access to other telecommunications
networks. This ‘‘off-net’’ offering was rebranded in November 2008 as ‘‘Virgin Media National’’.
Within each of our consumer cable product ranges, we offer our customers a choice of several
packages and tariffs which are labeled as Medium (M), Large (L), Extra Large (XL) and Extra Extra
Large (XXL). Our packaging and pricing are designed to encourage our customers to purchase
multiple services across our product range and we offer discounts to customers taking two or more
products from our portfolio. The types and number of services that each customer uses and the prices
we charge for these services drive our revenue. For example, broadband internet is more profitable
than our television services and, on average, our ‘‘triple-play’’ customers are more profitable than
‘‘double-play’’ or ‘‘single-play’’ customers. As of December 31, 2008, approximately 84% of our
customers on our network, which we refer to as ‘‘on-net’’, received multiple services from us and
approximately 56% of our on-net customers were ‘‘triple-play’’, receiving broadband internet, television
and fixed line telephone services from us. We believe that our customer retention rate improved in
2008 as a result of more of our customers subscribing to multiple services from us. We also believe that
the increased use of certain of our services, such as video-on-demand, and improvements in our
customer service, fault management and other operational enhancements also contributed to an
improvement in our customer retention rate. Our average monthly on-net cable customer churn, the
measure of the number of customers who stop subscribing to our cable services, improved to 1.2% for
the three months ended December 31, 2008, from an average monthly churn of 1.4% for the same
period in 2007.
Our Network Advantage
We believe that our deep fiber local access communications network provides us with several
competitive advantages in our addressable markets, including:
• Virgin Media, uniquely in the U.K., has optical fiber already deployed to street cabinets. From
there, our twin cable, consisting of both high capacity coaxial cable and twisted copper-pair
elements, provides us with the flexibility to deliver broadband services over either or both coaxial
and copper cables. Currently, we provide our broadband internet services over coaxial cable. Our
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