Originally posted by Spok
Thanks for the answers.
Starburst, I think that economics would be the decision maker here.
Eventually everybody who subscribes to Sky will have Sky+, and advertisers will not be pleased if everybody is skipping their ads. The advertisers will then stop advertising on Sky channels and go elsewhere. Sky will then have to weigh up the loss of subscriptions (not everybody would cancel) against the loss of advertising revenue.
The FF block would be implemented if economically necessary (why would it be built into the hardware if there was never any intention of using it?). Sky do not care about what their millions of customers think, they care only about making money.
A while back, long before Sky+, when Sky discovered that viewers were switching channels when the ads came on, started to transmit advertising breaks at the same times on all channels, so if you swithed to another channel you still got hit with adverts.
This was also an economic decision.
Spok.
SKY+ users.........250,000
SKY subscribers..7,200,000
Yes I have no doubt SKY would want all new subscribers to choose SKY+ as the basic hardware but it's going to be a long time before they will convert all subscribers to a PVR based STB
You are quite correct that the future of advert driven television is uncertain and advertisers are not going to spend money when they know that the vast majority of reported viewers will see their adverts.
However, SKY is a subscription service with adverts & sponsership accounting for less than 15% of their income, this fact makes a huge difference to how broadcasters on this any PAY platform will deal with loss of ad revenues.
I would contend the loss of advertising revenue could be easily absorbed by SKY own channels especially now they are making a profit and it would also improve their reputation and could infact increase subscribers from those who do see SKY as "cheap" telly, not in price but you know what I mean
The NDS design that SKY+ is based on was made for the American market where the political and economic considerations are far different to the UK and advertising in itself has been the cornerstone of US TV since it's inception. I hate to admit it but the BBC and it's funding method has at least curbed the rampant over the top US style of advertising in our TV market.
I would suspect that it would far cheaper to take the basic PVR design and just tweak it to run the middleware and software required for SKY D. The hardware would be still capable of all it's designed functions but they just wouldn't be accessible.
SKY do not have any control of third party channels and the time they decide to put their ad breaks on, that's simple paranoia
Yes I agree that for those that still view TV live and they channel surf during an ad break do see other channels also in ad breaks, no surprise though since the UKTV brand covers many channels, Discovery have many channels and Viacom have a family of channels as well and they probably will sych their programming.
There are a few third party channels that sell their advertising time using SKY's own marketing division, it's cheaper and gives them access to more clients which is why you see a lot of the same adverts on groups of channels.
