Mirror Television buys up Telewest cable arm

Mirror Television has bought Telewest’s cable TV sales arm Cable Adnet, for an estimated 10m.

Mirror Television will take over the sale of advertising to the 600,000 UK homes connected to Telewest, which represents 30 per cent of the country’s cable industry.

The buy gives Mirror Television a total of 850,000 cable-connected homes, and a total of 43 per cent of all homes connected to cable in the country.

Cable Adnet will be closed by November 14 and Mirror Television will set up a new sales house called City Television Network (CTN). The new division will be headed by Jon Waters, who joins Mirror Television from Classic FM.

CTN will set up offices in Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and London.

Last year’s sales of Cable Adnet totalled 3m. Current managing director Stephen Stokes claims this represents a 100 per cent increase on the year before.

Mark Cullen, assistant managing director of Mirror Television, adds: “It makes sense to have one company selling advertising space for the whole of the industry and we are talking to other cable companies about this.”

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