Unbundling SKY Content
Its only February and already we are seeing serious activity in the over the top content delivery – we’ve seen the partnership with Lightbox and Spark, we’ve heard about the probable NEON and Vodafone partnership, Quickflix is out there with their service, and we wait for the launch of NETFLIX next month. But, if like me you have SKY for the TV Channels (Mrs Young would suggest we have it for other channels as well) then the news that you will be able to access some of SKYs key sports on-line is an interesting proposition.
SKY has launched its OnDemand sports proposition offering Super Rugby, NRL and Formula 1 on separate subscription levels. Available on iOS and Android devices it can viewed live or on demand. The pricing is comparable with their current MySky services and will the quality will obviously depend on the quality of your broadband connection. Season passes are at $299 per sport, monthly at $49 and weekly at $19.90.
Blair Galpin at ForsythBarr suggests that the pricing of these new services is probably pitched at a point to minimise cannibalisation of their traditional premium services and highlights the moves SKY is making to retain a position in both the satellite and internet delivery spaces. He doesn’t believe these new services will lead to any significant reduction of existing SKY subscribers.
Our position is we welcome more choice for users, especially where these new choices make use of the new and faster networks being built around the country – and encourages users to upgrade to those faster services. We will continue to support more of these multi-channel multi-competitor markets.
At that high price they charge you would hope anyone that takes up their service is on an Unlimited Fibre plan, or the data usage will be well past most normal users standard caps in a matter of days not weeks (full hd uses around 10Mbps bandwidth)
Online games and iptv are two things you cant do at the same time on normal adsl now , and another thought, If theres enough iptv usage at peak times of the day will it slow our broadband network like other countries ? these are things not catered for at early development stages.
Think telecom XT launch when the new cellular network couldnt handle lots of people that joined and crashed because the network wasn’t capable of handling the load ?
Is our infrastructure ready for it or does it need a major overhaul first.