Sky Store brings 1000+ on-demand movies to Sky Anytime+
8 Mar 2012
Sky has expanded its pay-per-view movie offering for customers with Sky Anytime+. The new Sky Store replaces Sky Box Office and has over 1000 films available to watch on-demand.
SD movies start at just 99p, rising to £3.99 for blockbuster new movies in HD.
Sky also confirmed that Sky Anytime+ will be available to all Sky customers from Easter - a Sky Broadband subscription will no longer be required.
Sky Anytime+ delivers a wide range of on-demand content for free as well as offering pay-per-view films.
Sky is at pains to point out that its pay-per-view movies, via the new Sky Store if you're an Anytime+ customer, are cheaper than iTunes and Lovefilm in many instances.
New releases are £3.49, library movies are £1.99 and special offers are 99p. HD films rather than SD will cost 50p more.
Sky Box Office will continue as the place for non-Sky Anytime+ customers to choose from a more limited range of the latest movies on the live channels from £3.49 per title.
All Sky TV customers meanwhile can rent movies on a pay-per-view basis from the new Sky Store on laptops via the Sky Go application, which already has a Sky Movies application, too.
iPlayer V2 hosting platform was also designed to scale across multiple platforms
Actual Availability,
scaling to 1.5 million users,
15 million page views delivering over 1.1 billion(!) minutes of video each month
Two years ago when we launched iPlayer our goals and challenges were largely technical - scalability, reliability, video encoding
next set of challenges was not so much technical as social
"As people begin moving from television to the web, what happens to the role of the linear TV scheduler as the tastemaker
platform capable
the scheduler is the leading tastemaker.
iPlayer does a fine job of satisfying the time-shifted desires
BBC schedulers create the desire to watch a programme; iPlayer lets you see it at a time that's convenient to you
what if you no longer watched linear TV? Who becomes the tastemaker then?
largely theoretical problem
iPlayer home page that feels almost more like an application than a traditional web site
in the world of YouTube where there is no master scheduler who can shape demand.
clear evidence that linear TV created the demand while iPlayer satisfied it.
wanted it to become a driver of demand, s
The question then is, in a world which cannot be driven by schedulers
if schedulers are going to be augmented by your friends as drivers of consumption in the future, the challenge for the team was to integrate friends and social into the iPlayer
delights both early adopters and the mainstream audience.
folded your personal experience into the fabric of the main site
o integrate with Facebook and other social networks
make the recommendations and social graph visible within iPlayer,
addition of course to any external activity.
solution we came up with was to create a BBC login - known as BBC iD
can then connect with Facebook, Twitter
expandable Favourites zone
designed Favourites to be like your mail Inbox, showing the total number of items, how many are newly arrived,
rely on Favourites to give me a constant stream of things to watch
ll your favourites and other settings can roam across all the devices on which you use iPlayer.
So now if I'm bored sitting in a train on the way home, I can look for new programmes to watch, add them to my Favourites,
Personalised iPlayer home page
default view that everyone sees to something that's, well, just for you.
iPlayer traffic is doubling each year, it still only accounts for 2-3% of linear TV viewing.
Featured and Most Popular
For You and Friends:
iPlayer homepage into the tastemaker of your choice
connect iPlayer to your Facebook and/or Twitter social graph
Player home page to meet the needs of a mainstream audience looking for editorialised
My Categories
he iPlayer server will keep a lookout for any new content in your selected categories
big increase in live TV viewing in iPlayer - and with the upcoming World Cup being a huge driver of live online viewing
new Live Viewing page
fuel for the Friends drawer on the iPlayer home page
something that for some will be the killer feature of the new site
sync your iPlayer with theirs
Shout button - a
shouts only go to your Messenger friends who are in iPlayer right now
Watch with Friends is being added to the site in the next few weeks - stay tuned!
adaptive bitrate system
ch automatically adjusts
Adobe's upcoming Flash 10.1 release with H.264 hardware acceleratio
New iPlayer Desktop
Series Downloads and live radio & TV.
favourite programmes already downloaded to your computer ready to view when you're offline
Player Desktop will now automatically download every future episode for you
new feature in iPlayer Desktop for live TV
BBC's 17 network and national radio stations..
I am moving on to become CTO of Project Canvas, and this is the last major piece of work
Furthermore there were 14 billion views of VOD content via pay-TV services worldwide in 2010, 9 billion of which were in the US alone. 600 million long-form online videos were viewed in France and 5 billion via DVR time shifting in the UK.
On Demand viewing accounted for more than 5% of viewing in connected homes - equivalent to the third most popular linear channel in those homes.
In less than a year, the total number of connected Sky+HD boxes has more than doubled to 5.4 million, equivalent to 56,000 new households getting connected every week. This explosive growth means that more than 50% of Sky’s 10.6m TV customers are now connected, stretching Sky’s lead as Britain’s most popular connected TV platform.
Some analysts question whether VoD can be as profitable as broadcast TV. The dual costs of piping internet video into the home and licensing content from producers - both paid out on a per-view basis - "may call into question the level of profits that can be made in the long term" from VoD, says David Cockram of Oliver & Ohlbaum, a media consultancy. "More people are taking more of the pie."
Broadcasters already have to pay companies providing "content delivery networks" to ensure their on-demand programming reaches viewers in good quality and without loading-time delays mid-video. Every time a programme is viewed online through their VoD services, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and other broadcasters pay a CDN provider such as Akamai, Level 3 or, soon, BT.
Today, one half-hour programme costs between 2p and 5p to stream through a CDN every time it is viewed. That may not sound much, but with the BBC iPlayer serving up almost 60m TV shows in November, a broadcaster's CDN costs could already exceed £1m a month.
App Editions provide a fully-loaded, connected viewing experience that gives consumers the first five minutes of a feature film and a portion of bonus content that can include games, trivia, soundtracks and soundboards. The entire feature film can be unlocked via an in-app purchase, which enables downloading and unlimited streaming, as well as access to the entire array of bonus content available within the App.
What is 1MB of data?
1MB* on average is:
Browsing - using the internet on your O2 mobile
O2 Active
40 pages approx
Mobile internet sites outside of O2 (typically 3rd party websites not controlled by O2):
2-10 full web pages (depending on graphics, images, amount of text)
10-20 mobile web pages
Sending and receiving E-mail from your O2 mobile
200 emails without attachment
10 emails with simple one page attachment
Satellite Navigation
15 hours of Satellite navigation traffic alert service. Please note: Using GPS Sat Nav without the traffic alert service does not incur data charges.
Important information
The following services when provided by a 3rd party may consume large amounts of data and maybe subject to separate charge. We recommend you take a Browsing Bolt On if you use these services regularly:
Downloading video clips from 3rd party: typically between 1MB and 5MB depending on the length and quality of the clip, plus the cost of the video
Note - Downloading video clips/music/games from O2 costs the price of the content only with no additional data charges.
Downloading high quality music tracks from 3rd party: typically between 1MB and 5MB per track depending on the length and quality of the track, plus the cost of the track
Downloading games from 3rd party: typically 300KB, plus the cost of the game
We recommend that you avoid the following on your mobile:
Using VOIP** uses 1 MB of data every 3-4 minutes.
Downloading full-length movies as this may use in excess of 1,000MB.
Using video/ audio streaming devices (e.g. 'Sling box'), which connect your mobile device to your TV, also consume large amounts of data. Watching 15 minutes of TV on your mobile using these devices uses around 25MB.
* These figures are based on typical usage. Actual data usage will depend on the content of web pages viewed and the length of emails sent/received.
** Typical VOIP usage is around 5KB per second but will depend on a number of variables including codec and voice sample t