Revamped Sky online service on the way

A year after closing its "dismal failure" of an online service Sky Television has announced a revamped version will be launched before Christmas.

Sky TV chief executive John Fellet said the prospect of public and private investment in ultra-fast broadband infrastructure made the service viable again.

Mr Fellet announced a 16 per cent increase in net profit to $103 million for the year to June 2010 on the back of a 3 per cent rise in subscribers.

Sky TV is now in 47.9 per cent of New Zealand homes and Mr Fellet wants to protect that market by keeping internet users interested.

"All of a sudden the economics of internet delivery have dramatically changed," he said.

"You can already start to see ISPs [internet service providers] saying, `Look I'm going to have a price which is higher than I used to charge but it's going to be unlimited [data cap], and I think that's good news for people like us trying to deliver content."

The aptly named iSky service will include three streaming sports channels, a catalogue of 100 movies and 600 rental movies and television series. Viewers can also choose to catch-up on 10 to 20 programmes on each basic Sky channel as well as Prime.

The service will be rolled out in four phases starting later this year – initially for Sky subscribers – and will only be available on work or home computers.

Sky has a Mobile TV offering through a deal with Vodafone.

iSky will eventually be available to non-Sky subscribers, and on third party platforms such as XBox, iPad, PlayStation and internet-enabled TV.

The last phase of the plan involves direct delivery to the hard drives of the MySky digital recorders.

Mr Fellet said the company's previous approach to online was a "dismal failure" because "we had the wrong content and it was being stored overseas".

"When ISPs had to take their customers to look at our content, that chewed up valuable bandwidth on the Southern Cross cable which the ISPs got hit for, which they turned around and charged their customers for."

He said the company would not repeat those mistakes but he would not give any more detail about the online platform or whether the company had linked with an ISP to provide unmetered usage for its customers, as is common with other online video sites.

- © Fairfax NZ News