Virgin TV is a digital pay cable television service in the UK, owned by Liberty Global. Its origins date from NTL and Telewest, formerly two of the UK's largest cable operators, which merged on 6 March 2006. All NTL:Telewest services were rebranded as Virgin Media in February 2007. Since the acquisition of Smallworld Cable in 2014, Virgin is the sole national cable TV provider in Great Britain. about 51% of UK households have access to Virgin's network, which is independent from BT's Openreach network.