Sky seeks turnaround in fortunes
Sky Television is hailing a promotion under which it opened up all Sky’s satellite subscription channels to customers over the holiday season as a success, but is not saying whether it may be repeated.
The promotion came after a rough 12 months for Sky that saw Spark compete aggressively for sports rights and its share price settle at record lows below $2 – and ahead of a crunch year that will see it step up its efforts to stem customer defections.
Spokeswoman Chris Major said preliminary data suggested its two-week ‘‘Go Large’’ promotion lifted Sky’s share of television viewing 5 per cent, to about 61 per cent, in households that have Sky.
The increase was more marked for viewers in the 25 to 54 age group, with Sky’s share of their viewing increasing by 14 per cent, to reach 62 per cent.
Sky let customers watch all its non-pay-per-view sports, entertainment and Sky movie add-on channels during the promotion which ended on January 7, regardless of the plan they were on.
‘‘It was pleasing to see an increase in the amount of viewing of Sky channels over the twoweek period of the gift,’’ Major said.
She indicated the promotion had not been easy to arrange because of its supply contracts.
‘‘We have a large number of contracts with different channel providers and it took many weeks’ work to ‘unlock’ the rights on all channels.’’
Major indicated there would be other promotions in the pipeline as Sky seeks to protect its customer base from competition from Netflix and Spark.
These would include building on its existing ‘‘Sky Perks’’ programme, she said.
New chief executive Martin Stewart is due to take over at Sky on February 21.
He is understood to have been given a mandate to take greater risks to accelerate its transformation into a ‘‘multi-platform’’ company that also delivers programming over broadband.
Sky announced in December that it had reached a new agreement with satellite operator Optus that would allow it to continue to provide a satellite television service until 2031 on a new satellite to be launched by Optus.