Sky

We've noticed of late our Sky bill coming in at around Euro 70 a month. We take movies, sport and kids. As we've said before this is a substantial sum of money, surely around x 4 as expensive as a license fee. The problem is that a license fee goes into programming whereas a Sky subscription goes into profit.

We're not Sky-knockers but last night we were struck by that feeling that Sky, like the terrestrial channels, didn't have a whole lot going on. In fact we ended up watching a movie on RTE. I wonder how many people around Ireland and the UK are sitting there like us moaning because there's nothing to watch?

In the case of the BBC or RTE you can complain, there are rep groups for viewers. Sky does operate a viewer panel run by research group TNS:

"People who decide to join the Sky Viewer Panel are a select group of Sky digital subscribers across the country that have all given permission for Sky to collect viewing information from their set-top boxes."

So that's market research rather than interacting with customers. And as well there is a website that facilitates people who want to develop interactive services for SKY. To date though we haven't found anything like a viewers council or a user-generated response to Sky policies.

For such a dominant organisation we seem to have let it unusually free to influence our culture. Anyone interested in changing that?

SKY Sharing

I was at an IPTV demo a year ago looking at the Microsoft Media centre and one of the notable benefits of their system was the ability to share content and viewing with buddies elsewhere. That thought cropped up on this blog referring to a dinner talk on connectivity:

"He (Ankesh of Grouptivity) believes TIVO (Sky Plus for us) .... is a good example of the immediacy of content and now users expect to get the content they require when and how they want it.

His view is that although there are huge amounts of content available nowadays people just ignore that that they don’t want and therefore content recommended by a friend or network is preferable."

I think that kind of recommender culture is on its way and very important. The entertainment these days is not in the content it is in the connectivity.