Media: Perspective - Why Virgin Media versus Sky became a battle for pub talk.(British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC)

The rare sight of two girls fighting in the playground used to enliven a boring school day. The boys cheering them on as they played dirty: pulling hair and scratching, while screaming insults.

With this in mind, the recent spat between Sky and Virgin Media has, like watching Arsenal and Chelsea players engaging in a bit of attempted fisticuffs during last Sunday's Carling Cup final, awakened nostalgic feelings.

The Sky/Virgin tussle will probably cause no real harm in the long term, with the odds in favour of the warring sides eventually entering into an uneasy truce. Yet the very public dispute between the two media groups over the cost of carrying Sky's basic channel package on Virgin Media threw up at least two interesting issues.

The first was Virgin's excellence at drawing a usually reticent Sky into a public slanging match. Virgin's stirring tactics, which worked for so many years in the airline market against British Airways, have drawn the debate over Sky's supposed dominance of the pay-TV market into the public domain, and have coincided with the Department for Trade and Industry calling for an investigation into the legitimacy of Sky's minority stake in ITV.

Second, it reopened the debate over the merits of 'live' and 'event' TV above those of pre-recorded or back catalogue TV via video on demand. As Virgin crowed about its capture of the rights to show the first three series of Lost on its video-on-demand service, Sky went on the ...