Days after negotiating an improved deal to bring Sky’s basic TV channels back to it’s 3.5 million TV customers for upwards of £30 million, Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) is now considering selling its content division according to sources quoted by FT.com. The division includes digital channels Virgin 1, Dave and Watch and though FT.com’s sources stress the company has not been “hawking the business around” to potential buyers, a sale has been discussed at board level. Conversations ran along the lines of turning the business into “a series of communication platforms rather than producing any content of is own”, the story says.

VMED, which posted steady Q3 results yesterday, is in a better position to make any such sale after the BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) agreement and after persuading lenders to put back the final deadline for payments on the company’s £6.1 billion of debt to 2012. As Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett says in an interview with The Guardian today: “If we were so inclined as to dispose of an asset, you are far better off doing it in an environment where you do not have to sell it.” But if the market conditions are not right for a sale – and most would surely agree they are not – Berkett said VMED would be happy to wait until they are. More after the jump…

—Sky dispute, it’s good to talk: Despite an acrimonious and very public dispute lasting 21 months over the carriage deal between BSkyB and Virgin Media, which at one point looked set to end up in the High Court, Berkett says of Sky boss Jeremy Darroch: “I have his cellphone number and he has got mine”. He says “you can have respect for a competitor and you can have appropriate commercial negotiations” and that while he and Darroch realize that, “the people doing the deals did not at first”.

—Virgin’s technology advantage: Berkett told The Guardian his company was in a strong position in the broadband market because of its cable network – inherited from the defunct NTL – and the speeds it can manage compared to the copper/DSL technology used by Sky, TalkTalk or BT (NYSE: BT). To prove the point, Virgin will roll out its 50mb broadband service by the end of the year. VMED is still adding broadband customers: it added 68,700 in Q308 compared to 115,800 in the same period last year. In a gloriously mixed metaphor, Berkett admits that the overall spend on broadband is decelerating: “The growth of the total pie is slowing down faster than we expected it to because of the economy. But within that, if you look at our broadband tiers, the top end is growing.

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