The Sky's The Limit

Hot Press was at the Printworks in the Morrison Hotel recently for the unveiling of the new Sky Plus Home Page, which by the end of May will be the means by which all Sky TV customers navigate their way around their packages. Essentially, the page places elements such as On Demand, Box-Sets and New Series right upfront along the regular TV guide – there are eight options in total – meaning the product reflects the manner in which we now view television.

“It was literally drawn on a napkin on my office back in August,” laughs Alun Webber, Sky’s MD of Product Design and Development, of the new Home Page. “It started off as being four tiles, or options, but then we said ‘no, that’s not good enough’. We played with it and we had it working as a prototype in September. Then there was a trial with customers, and there were some different ideas as to what order they should be in and what the eighth box should be. We got into serious development and were done by Christmas, and we’ve been trialling it for the past three months.”

Satisfied they’d achieved a state-of-the-art interface, Webber and his team have begun the rollout of the product, which will be completed over the next few months.

“We do it incrementally,” he notes, “in case there’s a technical malfunction and we accidentally disconnect six million viewers!”

During his excellent presentation, Webber discussed the way in which people had viewed Sky Atlantic’s hot new show, True Detective, which has been one of the most talked about TV series in the world in the first three months of 2014.

One intriguing aspect of the way people watched the show was that having viewed early episodes through a major broadcaster – your correspondent looked at the premiere on his laptop via a Sky Go account – many viewers, unable to contain their curiosity, ventured off to internet sites streaming the rest of the series. Could Webber envisage a scenario whereby more networks followed the model Netflix adopted with House Of Cards, and offered entire series in one go, allowing for “binge-viewing”?

“I think people will experiment with it more,” he considers. “One of the things we did with True Detective was that we actually put the first episode up on On Demand before the first show aired. We got more people viewing it with On Demand, which was available for 48 hours beforehand, than watched it on the first linear showing on the channel. People are still looking at how best to use On Demand. I think the House Of Cards approach suits Netflix’s model, and I think the bingeing aspect works with box-sets. But for new shows, linear screenings and rolling it out week after week still has a long way to go.

“You want to keep customers coming back to the channel – the whole TV industry is built around that. People like choice. The other challenge with the Netflix model of everything being there at once is how did you keep that fresh? How do you have enough content coming through? You have to space it out a little.”

It seemed for a period as if TV viewing was becoming so personalised, the communal element of the experience was in danger of being lost.

“I think it got quite diverse for a while,” he observes. “The Planner’s good because it’s TV when you want. There are nights I’ll be watching with my daughter, nights I’ll be watching with my son. They’re about three years apart – he’s a Top Gear guy and she’s into The Newsroom and Criminal Minds. You get into different things. I actually think it’s bringing us back together more than in the past.”