Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) routinely puts out quarterly and monthly stats on its consumers’ VOD consumption - but that hasn’t stopped it packaging them together again for an annual snapshot…

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Yes, its on-demand service got 56 million video views in December (60 percent more than the year before) and more than half a billion video views throughout 2008. Fifty-two percent of Virgin’s 3.5 million TV customers regularly use the service.

Its iPlayer implementation earned 17 million views in December (up from 10.5 million in June), making up a third of all iPlayer consumption. We already knew iPlayer was a big driver for Virgin - the operator also now says its on-demand music channel saw over a million views of songs by X-Factor winners Alexandra Burke and Leona Lewis.

Virgin has genuine advantages with both its broadband infrastructure and its network-based VOD implementation (Sky+ is great, but who wants to bother recording shows to a box when they’re already available in the cloud?). But Virgin only offers VOD for those channels with which it has struck relationships - BBC, C4, ITV (LSE: ITV), Bravo, Living and Virgin 1, as well as movies. The real test will come when Sky is expected to start offering VOD over broadband via Ethernet to its SkyHD boxes later this year…