ESSENTIAL CEDIA
PUTTING SKY UNDER THE MAGNIFYING GLASS Simon Fulstow, founder of CEDIA member SONA, examines Sky Glass, its potential and pitfalls. Sky’s new ‘Glass’ offering promises new opportunities for the all-powerful TV service, but right now, without long term evaluation of the product or the service itself, what are the promised advantages (and potential pitfalls) of the new platform? Does this latest announcement actually offer any significant advantage over Sky’s current products, and will this be enough to usher in a new era of television and associated services? You can certainly understand Sky’s desire to control the entire user experience. In the CI market, we’re used to consolidating services and systems together so that the user experience is as seamless and intuitive as possible. As individual providers and systems become capable of so much more, it’s natural that these features start to become more accessible. It’s clear that Sky is looking to create a single pane of glass (see what I did there…?) experience, where its users don’t even need to leave the Sky ecosystem to access whatever they want to watch, and they are watching it all through a Sky branded device. The opportunities for Sky if they control that access are extremely powerful. It does feel like they have missed an opportunity with Sky Glass, however, in not making the service available without a TV set. It’s clearly a mass market decision – and something that they may change in future but tying customers into a ‘Sky’ TV with a soundbar, rather than giving them freedom of choice over choosing their own TV and competing head-to-
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head with the likes of Sony, LG and Samsung… well, it’s a bold decision. Whilst Glass does offer significant advantages over Q from a multi-user perspective – current information says up to 9 devices (3 TVs & 6 puck) will be supported on a single system – it’s important to look at every element of the system. What is the impact on system design and how will it affect subsequent conversations with clients regarding operation and reliability? Glass is a completely online service, with no backup or alternative if your internet service is having an off day or you run out of bandwidth. For many that could be a fundamental issue with the service - with required download speeds of 10 and 25Mb/s for each HD or 4K stream respectively, that’s between 90 and 225Mb/s required for nine concurrent streams. There is also no storage available on device for your saved programmes. So whilst theoretically free from the constraints of the 2TB hard drive on your SkyQ Silver box, all your favourites are stored in the cloud and streamed directly, whenever you want to enjoy them. Sky apparently want to control this element of how you access and watch your content so tightly that there will be additional charges to enable fast forwarding through adverts on saved programmes – an interesting concept! It does feel like they have missed a blindingly obvious solution here (and it may be in the pipeline) by not simply enabling Glass or an equivalent as an addition to their existing SkyQ
system as virtually all the UHD content on Q is currently delivered in this manner already. For customers with high speed leased lines, or in areas with FTTH connections then this type of service will be very appealing. However, I would personally be very hesitant to recommend a TV service completely dependant on internet connection (and quite a lot of it when the entire family are at home watching different shows). It’s also worth considering another element of what we call the ‘Sky dilemma’. As mentioned at the start of this piece, Sky have a powerful monopoly on how the vast majority of our clients watch TV, and whilst on demand service providers, such as, Netflix and Amazon have transformed the landscape of content provision, over 99% of our clients still all have and use Sky daily as part of their entertain solution. With that in mind, we’re essentially forced to use hardware imposed on us, with limited ‘high level’ technical support and reliability issues that in our experience leave much to be desired. Whilst our system design and topology is designed to mitigate reliability issues through the use of power management, maintenance and remote rebooting – the majority of service issues are generally caused by a ‘Sky box’ issue. That is certainly a point worth considering when discussing Sky’s latest and greatest with your clients and project partners. SONA sona.technology
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