[Satellite News 01-07-09] BSkyB hopes its Sky Player online TV service, which launched late last year, will find a strong niche among new customers in the United Kingdom.
    Sky Player TV offers live TV and video-on-demand and builds on the back of the Sky Player service, which launched in January 2006 as a legal online movie download service. BskyB, which already has around 9 million DTH subscribers, believes its service marks a key milestone for online TV in the region.
    “I am very optimistic,” said Griff Parry, director of on-demand at BSkyB. “The basic reason is that we are taking the proper TV experience online for the first time. It is a significant departure for us but also for the broader online TV industry as a whole. We are aggregating a broad range of content. We have 12 live channels and 23 on-demand channels, and both of those figures should grow. These are leading TV channel brands. It is a significant aggregation.”
    Satellite News Associate Editor Mark Holmes spoke with Parry about the future of Sky Player.

Parry: In a credit crunch situation, where people spend less time entertaining outside of the home, their in-home entertainment choices become more important to them. The subscription offers that Sky TV offers are extremely good value, and it ends up working in our favor. I am confident in subscription TV and our ability to sell Sky Player TV subscriptions. For the existing satellite subscriber base, this is a fantastic value-add story. It gives them more ways to watch what you have already paid for. I think it is a great time to launch this service.

 
Parry: I expect to see significant use within the existing satellite subscriber base. It gives them more options to watch Sky TV when and where they want. I would expect to see it impact decisions on whether people are coming to satellite in the first place and thereafter stay there, so there is significant evidence that this will change people’s perception of BSkyB and improving it. On the other side, I would expect Sky Player to drive a significant amount of incremental subscribers to Sky TV. The Sky Player subscription offerings provide those groups that we find more difficult to target with an attractive satellite-based proposition. We think there is a significant market for that.

Parry: I think what we are doing is significantly different from the video that is currently available on the Web. Web video is very popular and overwhelmingly free and short form. This is proper television. These are broadcast TV channels and TV equivalent quality. These are proper on-demand television programs. It is different stuff. The second point to make, I am very positive that pay-TV will be a success here. We think we can drive greater penetration in U.K. households. Sky Player will be one way that Sky TV achieves that. I am bullish on this.

Parry: You should expect to see a significant broadening of the content proposition over the next 12 months. I expect those numbers to be significantly bigger on both sides in 12 months as we build the Sky Player proposition to be similar to what we see on the STB.
There will be a bunch of other incremental improvements to the service at the same time. I am sure we will improve how we stream our live channels, for example. We have three selected stream qualities. We might start automating them to make them easier. We also still need to develop a piece of client software for Macs to enable them to watch movies and entertainment. We are committed to the product. The broad point is that the content will broaden.

Parry: We are certainly looking at what we can do. If you are on an Internet device you can deliver one-on-one content to people. We do currently have the capability to dynamically serve ads into on-demand content, but a subset of programs can have ads served into them, so we are thinking of upgrading that capability and perhaps using it more intelligently. There is always the possibility of serving different ads into the different live streams.