Neil Berkett, the chief executive of Virgin Media, has given the clearest indication that the company could look to sell its 50% stake in pay-TV venture UKTV.
Virgin Media, which owns UKTV jointly with BBC Worldwide, has never publicly admitted that a sale of its holding might be on the cards. Virgin Media, which made £7.1m in net income in the three months to the end of June from its stake, values its 50% holding at £351m including outstanding loans of £116m.
"It is not a strategic investment [and] as with any investment we look at it from time to time," said Berkett, speaking to MediaGuardian.co.uk after reporting better-than-expected second-quarter results. "There are ways and means we could realise [value]. We could realise it through holding [the UKTV stake] as investment and if there are ways and means of realising it through divestment we would [look at it]."
However Berkett, who has usually taken a taciturn approach when questioned over UKTV, also made it clear that the company did not necessarily see a sale as a strategic imperative unlike the decision it took to offload wholly-owned subsidiary Virgin Media Television.
He said that unlike VMTV, which was sold to BSkyB for £160m earlier this month after more than a year of complex negotiations, the UKTV operation was not a hindrance to Virgin Media's core strategic focus.
"UKTV is a joint venture between us and the BBC [Worldwide]," he said. "We treat it as an investment, we don't operate it. It doesn't distract us from our strategic aims as you could argue Virgin Media Television did. We think of it very differently from VMTV".
However observers have long considered Virgin Media's ownership of TV content businesses to be non-core to a focus on areas such as broadband and TV provision.
Last year a sale of Virgin Media's stake in UKTV was at the heart of ultimately fruitless discussions between BBC Worldwide, which effectively can control who the stake it does not own can be sold to, and Channel 4 to create a joint venture of assets.
Earlier this month Channel 4, which is headed by former UKTV chief executive David Abraham, struck a deal to handle the TV and online ad sales contract for UKTV.
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