The dish bites the dust.
Announced this month – the forthcoming death of a major media player, familiar in millions of homes and so innovative its impact on the broadcast world has been felt for almost 4 decades.
The Sky satellite dish is being phased out…….
I worked at Sky in its very early years. Now it’s a huge media and studio complex owned by Comcast (the owners of NBC and Universal), but back then it was one of a number of businesses on an industrial estate wasteland in deepest darkest West London.
Sky was a brilliant business to work for – full of ideas and innovation in both technology and content. I was in the Sky News business and editorially we broke the mold and shaped how rolling news is covered – even today. Sky launching a news channel forced the BBC to do the same and made creating public service content a real purpose for a commercial broadcaster. Whether it drove dish sales can be debated, what can’t be debated is how Sky News created a wider reputation for the company and meant Sky had a channel on in every opinion formers office in the UK and beyond.
So, the announcement that Sky is ending satellite dish installations is a small piece of media history.
Sky was satellite television – satellite television was Sky! Certainly, in the late 1980’s and through to the turn of the century.
Satellite dishes sprung up on millions of houses across the UK – but not for much longer.
It’s all about the streaming service now. Through Sky Glass or the newly announced Sky Stream – which feels like a winning product, although we don’t see it until the middle of October – Sky sees the future of the platform as content focussed and internet-delivered.
It actually feels like progress.
Stefan Lederer, CEO at Bitmovin – a streaming and video tech business – put the move into context saying to Advanced Television that the end of the dish is “indicative of the future of broadcasting, propelling us even closer to a world where everything will be streamed over the internet.”
The move will also put pressure on the broadcasters – as I suspect the product will be app based in its menu and push the old-style EPG’s further away from the front product interface.
The traditional broadcasters will have to up their Player offerings – perhaps first in line will be ITV with the new ITVX platform due to launch in Q4 2022. The BBC needs to up its game with the iPlayer as linear becomes less relevant in many households.
And what does it mean for the wider market? Well, it means that Apps and Players will be the gateway to all content in many homes.
The first business to have a true aggregation system that allows easy access to the SVoD platforms (Disney+, Netflix etc), the main broadcasters, the gaming consoles/platforms and the video platforms (YouTube, TikTok etc) really could corner the market.
It used to be that people – lead by the non-Murdoch tabloids – called satellite dishes an eyesore. Now, in my house it’s the multiple boxes underneath the TV that are becoming an eyesore. One box to rule them all – now that would be a great seller.