UK Gold May End Contract With Videotron Cable Operator

UK Gold has announced that its contract with cable operator Videotron may end on 12th February this year if it remains unable to agree terms for distribution of the channel.

Videotron covers parts of Southampton and London and if the service to these areas ends, UK Gold will lose two per cent of its 3.5 million weekly viewers.

Bruce Steinberg, Chief Executive of UK Gold, said:

“We have been negotiating with Videotron for over a year in an attempt to come to an agreement on terms which benefit both organisations.”

The main cause for disagreement between the two parties is that, according to Bruce Steinberg, “Videotron demanded flexibility which they were not willing to pay for.” This flexibility would have involved moving UK Gold to a higher satellite ‘tier’ to receive a bigger audience: a move which would have cost Videotron more money; Videotron also wants to charge subscribers more to receive UK Gold than other operators.

Videotron however states that negotiations are being held up by UK Gold’s insistence that 95 per cent of Videotron’s customers subscribe to UK Gold, whether they want to or not, and for not agreeing to carry UK Living. Because of these disagreements UK Gold is demanding that the cable operator pays up to 50 per cent more per subscriber than other operators are being charged.

Director of programming at Videotron, Benjamin Ball, commented:

‘We don’t insist that subscribers take packages – nor do we insist that they pay for TV channels they don’t want to watch.’