Video over broadband in the UK, direct to TV sets, is hotting up and now Sky has taken the plunge and promises that later this year it will offer a service called Sky Anytime Plus, which is its first real VoD experience. Sky Anytime has been around for a while, but was actually push VoD, where broadcast content was stored on your DVR whether you requested it or not, under the control of Sky. Then you can watch the recorded programmes just as if they were VoD, but they were stored on your hard drive.
In this new instance they really are being sent over the internet to your Sky box, and the facility has already been built into the new HD Sky Box, so can only be offered to HD customers. The service initially will also be limited to people who use Sky broadband lines.
This is likely to change fairly swiftly though because Sky Broadband lines are only in 2 million of the 10 million that have Sky TV service. Also many of these Sky broadband lines are actually wholesaled BT lines, so it is really just the router and the overall throughput that has to be tested for each ISP to be added to the system. Of course politics might get in the way, but we would have thought not where BT is concerned.
The service will only be launched with SD programming, so it is unlikely that any ISP will offer insufficient bandwidth as an SD TV signal, using the H.264 which Sky uses, needs only around 1 Mbps of bandwidth and almost all broadband services can promise that.
The announcement talks in terms of the films being streamed and says that any given piece of video can start in around 1 minute, but reading between the lines this is really progressive downloading. A full feature film can send in about 30 to 40 minutes, so it is coming as a file to stay on your DVR, but the film can start as soon as it calculates that enough of the file is present and the download speed can keep up with it. This is a method of ensuring quality, regardless of variations in bandwidth, rather than adaptive streaming, which offers varying bandwidth and which adjusts itself to fit the video frames into any bandwidth.
From start there will be 500 movies, but this is a considerable improvement on the Sky Anytime service which keeps a handful of movies and a couple of TV series. Sure hard disk sizes are going up all the time, but using Push VoD to a disk, always means that the content has to be something that has been broadcast.
By using real VoD it means that Sky can experiment for the first time with some content that is either paid for or not on the broadcast rota. That means that popular films can be retained for far longer without upsetting the broadcast agenda.
Additionally Sky Anytime Plus customers can also queue downloads to store on their set top boxes, and there will need to be a real search engine service, preferably one that will compete with the TiVo based service that Virgin is coming out with, where the search is carried out on a remote server in the internet cloud. The search must somehow be integrated into the4 electronic program guide onscreen.
This will all lead to Sky embracing a recommendation system to go with search capability. Sky often uses the UK to pioneer new concepts for News Corp, but in this case it is taking established practise in the US, where both DirecTV (once owned by News Corp) and Dish, the two leading satellite TV companies there, both offer this exact technology.
The new product will be triggered when a software update is sent to HD DVRs later this year, but no date has yet been given, and Sky has not said whether this service will cost anything.