{"id":1800,"date":"2007-02-08T22:38:14","date_gmt":"2007-02-08T22:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/2007\/02\/sky_on_freeview\/"},"modified":"2007-02-08T22:38:14","modified_gmt":"2007-02-08T22:38:14","slug":"sky_on_freeview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2007\/02\/sky_on_freeview\/","title":{"rendered":"Sky on Freeview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well. Very interesting news<\/a> about Sky getting properly into the Freeview act. Sky currently has three channels on Freeview that show Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Three. The first two are as you’d expect, but the third was essentially created for the Freeview platform to highlight Sky One shows a little later. So the new series of 24 won’t reach Sky Three until later in the year.
\nToday Sky’s announced that those three channels will become four using MPEG 4 compression, and they’ll be offering some premium content including Sky Sports, Movies, News and probably Sky One. We won’t know for certain until the official release comes out.
\nTo watch these channels will cost viewers cash, and they’ll also need to buy a new box, because the encryption that Sky will use will be similar to the very strong type that the Sky Digital satellite system uses.
\nThe reason for this sudden rush? Well Setanta, the up-and-coming sports TV channel has bought the rights to one of the Premier League TV packages next season, and they’ll also be offering it via Freeview – seemingly for \u00a310.99 per month. Of course, that’s a lot less than what Sky Digital costs, but then you get fewer games, and Sky has the best pick.
\nAll very exciting, but is this as smart a move as it might at first seem?
\nWell there’s already a pay-TV option on Freeview – Top Up TV (TUTV). Seemingly, it’s doing OK, but it recently changed its model fundamentally since Five took back much of its bandwidth to launch Five Life and Five US, meaning that TUTV had to move to a PVR scheme involving subscribers buying new boxes that automatically record programming for viewers to choose to watch later. Quite how successful this has been, we don’t really know.
\nThen there’s BT Vision which is a Freeview box with a broadband internet connection built in. Premium content is streamed via broadband, and you can pause and rewind etc. This also requires its own box.
\nAs mentioned, the Sentanta channel will soon be fully running on Freeview (at the moment it’s a sort of PPV offering). It’s not totally clear yet, but you will need a box capable of taking some kind of a card. This is a different type of box to current TUTV boxes or the forthcoming Sky box.
\nAnd when Sky launches the new service on Freeview, the current offering of Sky channels – in particular Sky News – will disappear from sets, something Sky’s acknowledged today<\/a>. That’s going to hurt Sky News in particular quite hard, and give BBC News 24 a good ratings bump. In many respects, this move alone will really annoy a lot of viewers.
\nSo why’s Sky doing this? Well the fortuitous timing sees the announcement come on the day that Virgin Media launches. This also neatly trumps the one real advantage that Setanta had until now – the opportunity to reach Freeview customers with their sports offering. And it seems Sky wants to start earning cash from Sky News. Although as long as Sky News remains “in the clear” on satellite, we know that’s not really the case. Murdoch is just taking this one on the chin for other ends.
\nWill this work in the long term? I’m not at all sure. Sky has great marketing muscle, but there are an awful lot of boxes in the market that aren’t going to replaced with shiny new Sky ones. And suddenly Freeview gets even more complicated for consumers with multiple box offerings for things like Premier League football.
\nIf I was Michael Grade at the moment, I’d take a close look at the spectrum available on Freeview – perhaps buy out and close down TUTV – and use some of the additional spectrum to relaunch the ITV News Channel. Failing that, Turner might want to consider doing something with CNN. There’s an opportunity there I reckon.
\nSky’s been able to do this, incidentally, because of a change in the rules<\/a> that Ofcom made last year which didn’t seem to attract much attention at the time. Prior to the rule change, Freeview multiplexes B, C and D were not able to carry pay TV. B is owned by the BBC, while C and D are owned by National Grid Wireless. Sky is on C…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well. Very interesting news about Sky getting properly into the Freeview act. Sky currently has three channels on Freeview that show Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Three. The first two are as you’d expect, but the third was essentially created for the Freeview platform to highlight Sky One shows a little later. So […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}