By: MarkJ - 21 January, 2010 (8:16 AM) - Score: 1281 - Fixed Line Broadband, Piracy

Long held plans by Virgin Media UK and Universal Music to launch a DRM-free music download and streaming service for broadband customers could finally come to fruition in July. New reports suggest that VM will call their service MusicFish, although this has not yet been officially confirmed.

Some other sites have suggested a price point of £6.49 per month for unlimited streaming and downloads; though this would appear to be a case of too many cooks incorrectly copying the original news source. A Virgin Media spokeswoman informed us that such a price point "may actually be referring to Sky Songs" and not MusicFish. Indeed SkySongs offers unlimited streaming and 1 album or 10 songs for £6.49 per month.


In reality we know very little about what Virgin Media is planning, although their latest statement above suggests that Sony and EMI remain reluctant to sign up and continue to delay. VM had originally intended to launch a fully P2P based unlimited music service, although some of the same music labels managed to scupper that idea.

We know from last year that Virgin Media is still trying to fight for an unlimited download tier to their service, though the haggling over price and quantity remains a key stumbling block. Rumours have suggested that a monthly price point of £15 is likely to result in a limit of 40 music track downloads per month.

In related news Virgin Media has begun its trial of CView’s Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology, which aims to help identify the amount of illegal file sharing on its network. We have already reported on this several times (here, here and here). Privacy Campaigners are understandably not amused.