I am a Leytonstone girl by birth. I share that provenance with David Beckham, and I have many happy memories in my teens of going to watch Trevor Brooking (look him up, if you’re under 40) at Upton Park.

It was a different football world, back then. No seats, for a start. And it did not seem that long ago since England lifted the World Cup with a West Ham player as captain.

So, after all these years away from the game, it’s good to be part of the team at Virgin Media asking Ofcom to look into the ever-increasing costs of watching live football on TV.

We pay the highest prices in Europe to watch the least amount of football. There is clearly a lot of support for what we have asked Ofcom to do.

Whether Bobby Moore, who earned £1,000 for winning the World Cup, would back us, we will sadly never know.

The Commonwealth Games was a great sporting event this summer. Glasgow, next door to Virgin Media’s major centre in Bellshill, has become a second home this year for many of us in the company.

While the Games were a great success, we are determined to create a digital legacy for the city as part of our sponsorship.

Digital skills transform lives, yet 40% of Glaswegians say they lack the confidence to do basic online tasks. These skills are a great way to engage with the wider world.

We are working with some of the least digitally savvy communities there to make the web relevant and useful to them.

I try not to miss any opportunity to don a high-visibility jacket. Last month I was in Papworth, just outside Cambridge.

How apt it is that the village, famous for the first successful heart transplant 35 years ago, is where Virgin Media is trialling cutting-edge technologies in deploying broadband.

SNarrow trenchingT is an innovative technique for laying cables that enables faster and more efficient roll-out of our superfast network.

We were delighted to see Ed Vaizey recently support this in the Commons – and introduce the term Sfoam concreteT to the political lexicon. You heard it here first.

It’s good to see our new ad campaign is going down so well. It was developed following extensive research into the changing ways
we all watch TV.

In today’s Salways-onT digital world, people want to be able to watch what they want, when they want and where they like. That might be on a rainy day (or weekend) on the sofa with our extensive library of movies – like our character Ed, the Sofa Bear. Or Sjust one more episodeT late at night, with our fantastic range of box sets, available on-demand any time – like Ally the Night Owl, which definitely best describes me.

Flights are a good time to catch up on reading. Soon after our new and energetic Secretary of State, Sajid Javid, announced at the RTS London Conference that he would review EPG prominence and the balance of payments between platforms and PSBs, I read Enders’ excellent analysis of retransmission fees.

Virgin Media does not – nor has it ever – charge public service broadcasters for carriage. We simply do not believe that viewers should pay again for programmes that they have already paid for.

That’s a tax at the point of consumption and would constitute a fundamental change to the thriving and unique PSB model in the UK. The review will make for an interesting debate, with possibly far-reaching and unintended consequences.

The next flight was to Switzerland, where I was lucky to spend a few days attending a group-wide leadership programme with colleagues from Liberty Global.

One of the many advantages of being part of an international company is that we can share ideas and practices from around the world.

Being away and working intensely together means we all bring back to our own areas a renewed energy, not just to make the company a better place to work, but a better company to work with.

These events are a bit like going to New York: the whole thing is exhaus­ting but the buzz remains long afterwards. Swiss wine is surprisingly good, too 

I have spent most of my career in the media and telecoms industries, at Dow Jones, ITV, Mercury and Cable & Wireless. The convergence that was much talked about early in my career is definitely here. It’s an extremely important and exciting time for the industry and I’m delighted to be back.

 

Brigitte Trafford is Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Virgin Media.