Why I gave up Sky

subscribers to buy a bundle of stuff at a high price, most of which we don’t want. And at a time when consumers are flexing their muscles, empowered by social media, Sky has done little I recall to inspire loyalty. So, see ya.

Admittedly it’s easy for me to say. Going without sports is no hardship as I am terrified of the very things that a majority of people find give them a buzz — crowds, concerts, competitive anything. (Wonky oxytocin receptors I suspect). But having to give up Sky could be irksome to lots of neurotypical sports lovers who don’t want to hand their box back. Not to mention rural residents where internet speeds are cruddy and streaming isn’t an option.

And yet, it turned out the prospect of Sky getting its comeuppance was not as satisfying as I might have imagined. Its downfall seems inevitable, I expect it will disappear if the reverse takeover by Vodafone goes ahead.

Yet thinking about this did not give me the expected kick of schadenfreude. Why was that?

Maybe because there is a two-bald- men-fighting-over-a-comb aspect to vanquishing Sky. The real moustache-twirlers are in Silicon Valley — tech juggernauts such as Amazon, Apple and Google.

It is hard to salsa on Sky’s grave when, really, the whole industry is in a “salad spinner of shit” (From Veep, from memory.)

The disruption happening to television is only the same thing we have already experienced in music, publishing and print media and other industries, and having been there, we know how the story ends.

It is a “winner takes all” culture where there will still be one or two mega-stars in a certain field, but most of the middle echelon people will be surplus to requirements. We need grief and loss support groups for people who have trained for a career and then find themselves stranded, unwanted, their whole industry in chaos. Tech gurus say we need more disruption, and that might be great for high-testosterone venture capitalists but for many of us, all there is left is a deep sense of loss and confusion.

So nope. There is no satisfaction in forseeing the demise of Sky.

The speed with which technology can change an industry today is truly staggering. As Nick Bilton writes in a piece in the latest Vanity Fair, when Silicon Valley goes after an industry (transport, hotels, cars and so on) it does so with a punch to the gut. The newspaper industry’s workforce has shrunk 56 per cent since 2000. Bilton predicts Hollywood is next.

And given we are really just apes who tell stories, this could be scary. It will be bad for storytellers in general if one company can seize a 50 per cent share in storytelling. Tech companies are talking about artificial intelligence, creating computergenerated actors and algorithms which will be able to write screenplays as witty as Aaron Sorkin’s.

But I can’t help noticing, the stories we respond to most viscerally are not about these uber-winners. The stories we love still tend to be about some humble person who has the audacity to take on the powerful.

This is what endures, and maybe Sky should have remembered that. Lord of the Rings: “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.”

Shall I get that tattooed? Somewhere.