Sky – Page 3 – Digital-Lifestyles

Sky Broadband DRM Woes Halt Films

Sky Broadband DRM Woes Halt Films Sky has hit the pause button on delivering films (known by some as movies) and sport via their Sky By Broadband service, due to cracks in Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM software.

Sky has put an announcement on their site,

In order to make an essential update to the Sky by broadband security system, we are sorry that access to all movies and some sports content has been temporarily suspended. This does not affect your computer and content can still be bookmarked for future use. We will keep you posted on progress and apologise for any inconvenience.

Clearly being a big bash for the service, it must be of great embarrassment for all concerned. Content owners from around the world – especially those within the News International family, Fox, etc – will be throwing a dizzy fit, having bought the technologies companies long-lasting pitch that DRM is essential for the survival of the content biz. You see, most of them feel their clients are not to be trusted with the content,that they’re so used to having.

Sky Broadband DRM Woes Halt Films Background
A couple of weeks ago, a little software app called FreeUse4WM appeared, that stripped the Digital Rights Management (DRM) from any content, be that audio or video, held in the Windows Media format.

Following this, Microsoft threw people at fixing the problems – they had to, as it laid bare all of the content that it was supposed to protect. Sitting back with a smug look on their faces (we imagine), they must have choked on their latte’s when version 1.2 of FreeUse4WM came out, cracking the DRM and exposing the content again. It’s understood that Microsoft are working on the fix for v1.2.

Security of all sorts is just a game of cat and mouse, with no absolute guarantees – security company created protection

Pub Landlords Get One Over On Sky

Pub landlords get one over on Sky Sky TV has a strong market presence in providing big screen football to the drinking public in licensed premises in the UK. This virtual monopoly has long been a bone of contention for ‘Mine Hosts’ keen to encourage soccer imbibers to their premises for the big games, but over a proverbial barrel in terms of the price they have to pay.

Sports rights owners sell their rights by territory, but radio waves beamed out of the heavens know little of national country borders, and some enterprising landlords have made arrangements to take their soccer from sources other than the UK licensed broadcaster, Sky.

Pub landlords get one over on Sky Greek, Czech and Arabic satellite TV channels have signed up with the UK’s Premier League for coverage of the UK’s beautiful game, and the deal they have is at a much better price (as we’d expect), than the one Sky negotiated, in what is a competitive market for commercial coverage of the national game.

British licensed premises can pay up to £6,000 a year for Sky’s football package and the same games, without the irritating commentary, can be received for a more manageable £39 a week from overseas operators.

Sky feel that such arrangements are against their interest and are taking the matter to court, but there’s an argument that the free EU market should permit the Greek ‘grey’ import to be available to the market. While the legal niceties are sorted out, packages designed to satisfy the UK market are clearly available on the Internet and are labelled as ‘legal’ for British pubs, citing the European soccer body EUFA .

Extreme Sports Channel Added to Sky Mobile TV

Extreme Sports Channel Added to Sky Mobile Offering UK satellite operator, Sky is building on their video offerings on the Sky Mobile service, by adding the Extreme Sports Channel.

Sky and Vodafone have been offering video content on their 3G network since October last year.

The latest addition will offer made-for-mobile content including a series covering the best and worst slams and profiles on the ultimate extreme sports legends as well as existing content such as the acclaimed Tips & Tricks series.

Sports has been popular content on Sky Mobile TV, so as Stephen Nuttall, Director of Business Development at Sky says, “we’re giving customers even more of what they enjoy.”

We suspect that Sky is adding the extreme sports to attract a different sort of subscriber to the service, which they’re not increasing the price of, leaving it at £5/month for unlimited access.

All of this content is currently only available to Vodafone 3G subscribers, but it is expected that other networks are in discussions with Sky and it’s expected that they may offer it on their networks.

Sky Mobile TV

Sky Results: Long-Term Concerns?

Sky Results: Long-Term Concerns? BSkyB results for the last year were broadly in line with predictions, but seasoned watchers of all things financial, recognise tell-tale signs of a flattening of the growth curve. The company has managed its spend on programming well, but technology costs remain high, with significant outgoings on expensive High Definition equipment, that won’t bring instant revenue returns.

Sky, as the company brands itself in the UK, looks increasingly like a utility platform-come-broadband wars‘ that are unlikely to see any great financial gains for those taking part.

As Telcos have become drawn into offering entertainment packages to make their own offerings ‘sticky bundles’ – that their customers are loathe to detach themselves from – the entertainment companies are forced to provide competing phone and broadband packages, along with the capability of on-demand TV downloads. This won’t be cheap, as Sky has already found to date with its Easynet purchase, and may prove to be more expensive, if they decide to acquire the UK AOL subscribers from Time Warner.

Sky’s average revenue per subscriber (ARPU) has dropped by £4 and along side this they’re facing stiffer competition from Freeview, the UK Digital Terrestrial platform. Freeview now has a free-to-air movie channel (Film 4) and is due to add two further entertainment channels provided by the UK channel ‘Five’ this autumn. Cost-conscious multi-channel homes will continue to gravitate to this low frills platform.

Sky, like pay-TV services worldwide, has a high churn rate, although its managed to reduce this, it remains somewhere over 10% (that’s the percentage of subscribers over the past year who ended their subscriptions). Achieving this has been costly with increased promotional spend and marketing offers to keep current subscribers signed, which has in-turn hit the bottom line.

Sky Results: Long-Term Concerns? James Murdoch the CEO of BSkyB told the corporate world that “Our industry is changing faster than ever before and for Sky, 2006 has been an important and exciting year.”

With the NTL/Telewest /Virgin mobile merger and its re-brand starting to gather traction, it looks like Sky can look forward to even more excitement in 2007.

Sky Buys Mykindaplace: Murdoch Grabs More Of The Web

Sky Buys Mykindaplace : Murdoch Buys More Of The Web The Murdoch empire continues to buy to part of the online world, as BSkyB announce the full purchase of Web publishing and design company, mykindaplace, a company that they’d invested in 2000 when they previously dabbled in buying bits of the Internet.

Founded in 1999, mykindaplace has a couple of publications aimed at teenagers, one for girls, and another boys, monkeyslum, that launched in September 2004. At the other extreme end of the age range, they also published livingit in January 2006 aimed at those 45+.

With the purchase of mykindaplace, Sky will also gain Burst Interactive, which currently handles the skyone.co.uk site for Sky.

Sky Buys Mykindaplace : Murdoch Buys More Of The Web James Baker, Managing Director of Sky Networked Media, who will have the mykindaplace teams under his power, invented a new term to us “super-serve,” when he said “Working even more closely with mykindaplace will allow us to accelerate the expansion of our web portfolio. We intend to super-serve audiences in key content genres and target new users with a suite of content-rich sites thatdeepen customer relationships and drive new revenue.”

Sky who already owned 49% of mykindaplace bought Eurovestech shareholding in Mykindaplace for £0.5 million cash back on 30 June. We understand that Eurovestech owned 5.6% which they bought into at the same time as Sky back in April 2000. At the time of going to press, it isn’t clear who owned the remaining shares, although it is understood that Freeserve invested in the company in 2000 as well.

Sky Broadband: Analysis

Sky Broadband Analysed Yesterday saw the press unveiling of Sky Broadband, showing the eventual absorption of EasyNet, the UK ISP that they 3).

If your reaction is, “Don’t Sky do satellite TV?,” you haven’t been paying much attention recently.

Sky’s offering is simple. Three different speeds of connection – 2Mb (Base) for no payment; 8Mb (Mid) for £5/month; and 16Mb (Max) for £10/month. Connection fees vary with Base at £40, Mid £20 and Max being free.

Each of the bundles include a wireless router and McAfee security software.

Sounds cheap? Well there’s a slight caveat to the ‘free’ service; you need to be a subscriber to their TV service.

Registration via their Web site or SkyActive has been available from noon today and the product will start selling from August.

sky broadband analyses Sky marketing have been taking their now-expected simplistic approach to the name of the product, with Base, Mid and Max. It’s genius like this that produced the name Sky+, the name that sold 100k+ PVRs to the UK public, when previously they didn’t understand what the hell it was.

How does it fare against the others?
The prices are considerably lower than most of the offerings in the UK, with an equivalent pay-for 2Mb connection from BT costing £18/month.

True, to qualify for these Sky Broadband services you do need to subscribe to Sky TV, but surprisingly at only the cheapest, £15/month package. This approach differs from what they’ve done for many of their other recent ‘hi-tech’ offerings like Sky By Broadband, Sky By Mobile, which required subscription to one of their ‘Premier’ packages.

The closest offering to ‘free’ broadband in the UK are two fold – Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk, and Orange, post merger with Wandadoo. TalkTalk requires an 18-month contract for a phone line with a rental of £20.99/month and Orange requires a mobile phone bill of at least £30/month.

Installation
As per most UK broadband offerings, Sky is expecting most of their installations to be done by the customer, after they’ve received their bits and pieces through the post. The wireless router (which looks like a 3Com unit), sounds self configuring, with the subscriber just needing to load software on their suitably-equipped PC, or …. shock/horror, Macintosh.

If people feel they’re not up to the job, the ever-helpful Sky will send an engineer around to your house to install it all for £50, unless you’re a Sky Max subscriber, in which case it will be free.

This is a big differentiator with the Sky offering. This isn’t offered by other ISPs – it’s simply not economic to do it. It’s also quite a bargain. Depending on the part of the country you live in, you would normally be hard pushed to get someone to come around to your house to install and set up your DSL and a wireless network for that sort of money.

One thing that Sky does excel at, is customer service, and they clearly want this to go as smoothly as possible.

Coverage
These packages aren’t available all over the UK, as Sky Broadband’s reach is limited to the number of exchanges that have been unbundled by EasyNet, as was. Sky are quoting coverage at 28% of the household of the UK, with the high speed (16Mb/s) service only available to an estimates half of these, giving coverage of about 14%.

With their promise to invest around £400/m over the next three years, Sky will be increasing coverage with the stated aim being 70% of UK households by 2007.

Those who fall outside these have to make do with what they call Sky Connect, which is limited to an 8Mb/s service at £17/month.

Analysis
Sky are doing a smart thing here – effectively getting their customers to install another means of Sky delivering content into their homes.

No-one at Sky would be drawn to talk about any firm plans to deliver video content over the broadband connections, but clearly that will be the next move. They can pre-load films, while the connection isn’t being used by the family.

That explains one of the reasons they’re doing it, but why else?

Sky Broadband Analysed Since James Murdoch took over running Sky, its stated ambition has been 10 million subscribers by 2010, but as we get closer to that, it’s getting hard to convert over those naughty-non-subscribers.

To build toward 10m, Sky really need to keep hold of their current subscribers, and some find they don’t need satellite TV anymore. Bringing them in and locking them into a broadband service is a great way of doing it.

The other thing they need to bring in, is new subscribers and offering potential subscribers incredibly cheap broadband is a pretty good way of doing it.

Other things that Sky are doing is getting their subscribers more closely linked in, or locked in to their service. It’s interesting to see that Sky will be providing a personalised portal of their own, providing photo management and address book. If you’ve ever tried to extract yourself from a photo sharing service – and escape with your photo’s – you’ll know it’s not easy.

Other bits that will be given over are as the previous Sky By Broadband offerings of film, sports and news clips. Oh and, big wow, you’ll also be able to get an @sky.com email address (wonder if [email protected] has gone already?)

Sky will really put the cat among the pigeons with this one. It’s a very keen price, that will hopefully start bringing down the price of broadband for the UK.

Sky Broadband

Sky Broadband – From Free!

Sky Releases Free Broadband Service As expected, Sky has released details of their new “free” broadband promotion, which offers their 2Mb Base package for nowt.

[Read our analysis of Sky Broadband news]

But skinflints looking for a free feast of broadband take note: you only get the service if you’re already an existing SkyDigital network customer, and it comes with the additional sting of a £40 activation fee.

I’d rather jack
Punters who don’t know their phone jack from their Monterey Jack can also expected to be thwacked around the head with the extra optional £50 fee to get their home install sorted by Sky.

Users of the free broadband deal will find their downloading pleasure limited to a 2GB monthly usage cap, although they can upgrade to the ‘MID’ package, offering up to 8Mbps on a 40GB data cap for a fiver a month, with a lower £20 activation fee.

There’s also a ‘MAX’ option, which gives ‘unlimited’ downloading at a speedy 16Mbps with no activation or home install costs, all for a tenner a month.

Sky Releases Free Broadband Service For users out of a Sky network area, there’s the pricey ‘Connect’ option which offers up to 8Mbs connectivity, 40GB usage cap, £40 activation fee and £50 home install for a distinctly upmarket £17 per month.

All the offers include a free wireless Sky broadband box.

Growing the network
Easynet (owned by Sky) now owns a LLU network covering roughly 28% of UK homes, based primarily inside urban/city areas, with the company expecting to reach 70% coverage by the start of 2008.

Sky reckons that its broadband service – currently swallowing up £400m of operating profits and costing £250m in capital expenditure – will start to hit the break-even point sometime between 2009 and 2010.

Sky Releases Free Broadband Service 30 per cent of Sky customers on broadband
The company also said that it expects 30 percent of its approximately 8 million customers to be signed up to its new broadband service by 2010.

Sky’s chief executive James Murdoch claimed that many of his rivals had been overcharging their customers, “A lot of incumbent players have been charging a lot of money for a long time for not a lot. It could be uncomfortable for them.”

“We can see huge growth in this market from a revenue perspective and for customer loyalty. We can also grow market share,” he added.

Jon Florsheim, managing director of Sky’s customer division, was ready to go even further, insisting that research showed that Sky would pick up new business from competitors.

“The bloodbath is not going to be on our front lawn,” he added, in his best Clint Eastwood voice.

It wasn’t all joy and happiness in the City after their announcement though, with Sky’s shares slumping 3.9% after the announcement of the new broadband service.

Sky Broadband

Ofcom To Provide Solomon Judgement On HD Frequency Spectrum

One of the challenges facing Stephen Carter’s replacement as head of the UK communications regulator Ofcom, is how the frequency spectrum released by the move to digital terrestrial TV will be allocated. Not only is the decision crucial for Ofcom, who must reconcile both the requirement to allow the market to operate while taking into account the British citizen, but it also figures in the BBC’s strategy around the impending licence settlement and the organisations’ worldwide ambitions.

Although the World Cup has not been the High Definition eruption many in the electronics retailing sector had hoped for, there is now a realisation in the industry; that the move to adoption of flat screen TV displays has started in the homes of Great Britain.

How will displays receive the content to create the impetus for a large scale take up? The likely options are; Cable under what is expected to be a Virgin branded offering; Sky who are pushing HD to protect and grow their revenue; the BBC who are committed to both an alternative to Sky on Satellite and providing their content on all viable platforms and broadband, which looks increasingly viable by virtue of higher transfer rates to the home, along with improved digital compression technologies.

The issue for Ofcom is, should the frequency spectrum vacated by analogue TV go to the highest bidder (which on past experience looks likely to be mobile communications of some sort), or should it propel TV into the HD age with the potential benefit for the UK’s important media industries?

France, slower off the blocks in moving to a Digital Terrestrial TV service, with its’ amusingly acronym-ed TNT, has a solution that builds in HD capabilities, and for sure the UK will not wish to be seen falling behind mainland Europe.

And where does the BBC anguish become an issue? Well, if the only methods of receiving HD are by commercial operators Sky and Cable, how does the BBC reconcile the cost to all viewers when only a subset can receive it? The BBC is terrified of losing arguments that could justify a decrease of its universal fee, or marginalisation of its place as a leader in the deployment of advanced distribution and production technology. They’re actively lobbying to make sure that new frequency plans allow for both mobile TV and HD terrestrial.

Given all this, it looks like Stephen Carter could be showing admirable timing skills in vacating the OFCOM hot seat.

Sky High Vlog: The Army On Everest!

Sky High Vlog: The Army On Everest! Sky News are very proud of what they’re billing as the Highest Ever Video News Podcast (or HEVNP to all of you acronym manufacturers out there).

We genuinely do admire reporter Gerard Tubb and producer Jon Gripton who are doing the video pieces from the slopes of Everest. They’re joining the 21 UK Army mountaineers from the regular UK and territorial armies (Special forces of some sort, we’d wager) who are aiming to get to the top via one of the toughest routes, The West Ridge – also worthy of huge admiration.

Tubb and Gripton have been in training for three months and have been using oxygen-reducing respirators to alter their blood so it can cope with life at high altitude. Tubb has also been to the Alps to be taught ice-climbing and crevasse rescue techniques by legendary mountaineer and mountain guide, Twid Turner (great name), who trained the expedition team.

From the report we’ve already seen, it’s rather cold there, especially at night where temperatures are dropping to -1c. Even if you don’t happen to freeze to death, we don’t envy finding yourself waking up every 10 mins during the night with the feeling that you’re drowning. As Tubb’s says on the blog “the depressed CO2 levels can make you stop breathing until it builds up and triggers a fit of hyperventilation.” Nice.

We’re not ones to pick nit (well, OK we are), and we’re certainly not deriding the amazing accomplishment of what they’re doing, but as to whether they’re the highest? Rumours are abound that people have seen higher vodcasts shot on location in Amsterdam, and others insist that they’ve seen other shot in planes (but that’s not on the Earth is it).

Sky High Vlog: The Army On Everest! What kit to take to Everest?
OK … We’d imagine that after reading this, you all planning your own assent of Everest, right?

Question number one, before you get to pick a splendid new jacket, is what tech kit you need to take with you? Clearly it’s pretty specialist.

You’d imagine that it would be something with a huge keyboard, so you can type while wearing huge mittens. Well you’d be wrong clever sticks.

The laptop of choice is the Panasonic Toughbook. We’d been really impressed when we’d had this at Digital-Lifestyles towers. It’s got great features like the hard drives sit in a bath of oil that gets pre-heated to a temperature it can work at. In this case they’re not using those drives. They also chose them as reliability is top priority, as there aren’t too many laptop repair shops on the Everest slopes.

Sky High Vlog: The Army On Everest! The video is being shot on two cameras, both Sony’s, the HVR-Z1, or Z1 as it’s know in the trade and the HVR-A1 (A1), having the advantage that it’s really small – pretty useful when you’re having to lug it up Everest.

Once shot, the video has some light editing done on the Toughbooks using Avid Express. The video is then fired back via a satellite dish at Base Camp to Sky HQ.

Cool bits from the Army
The army’s really gone to tech town on this one, with great stuff like providing Google Earth place holders showing things like the teams routes and amazingly cool, dynamically updated team positions.

The army aren’t just leaving the videocasts to Sky, they’ve got a lot of their own sitting on the podcast section of their site. Some of them are pretty interesting.

Good to see that even the army uses the tried and tested ‘hold your comms device in the air to get reception’ trick that we’ve all used at one time or another.

Also pleasing to see that the Junior team contains a fair number of women in it.

To top it off, they’re also doing exclusive videos to your mobile for free.

NTL, BT Nowhere In Premier League Football Bids

NTL Nowhere In Premier League Football Bids There had been some excitement, well amongst UK media analysts at least, that BSkyB might loose its dominance of the control of UK football’s Premier League.

Today we learned who the winners were.

Following pressure from the European Union (EU), who had stated that all matches couldn’t be controlled by the same broadcaster, the games for this round of bidding were split into six packages of 23 games each. The EU threatened legal action against the Premier League if their will wasn’t complied with. Not surprisingly, they did.

Clearly BSkyB bid. Having exclusive right to the football was one of the cornerstones that built the success of Sky in the UK.

Other bidders included NTL, fronted by the bearded-wonder – Richard Branson, who had been acting the big I AM, threatening to out bid Sky for the available six packages. BT made some noises too.

NTL Nowhere In Premier League Football Bids Finally the other company, Irish broadcaster Setanta, had thrown its hat into the ring, originally saying they were going to bid for two of the packages. Those not in the broadcast world wouldn’t necessarily know who Setanta are, but most people will know of their 40% owners, Benchmark Capital.

The results of the bidding? Sky got four of them and Setanta the other two. With only six on offer, the other pretenders got nothing.

For the UK Football Association, it’s a giant payday with the total amount paid rising from £1Bn three years ago, to £1.7Bn covering the next three years. Not bad work if you can get it. Expect many more overpaid footballers and lurid stories in the tabloids. The Cristal champagne will be flowing tonight.

Premier League