Broadband News

The Ashes approaching and then reaching a dramatic climax at the same time as the Premier League season got underway has given Sky a record number of new customers for its Sky Sports and News mobile television package as well as its 24-7 football goals and highlights service.

The surge in interest is bound to put pressure on the country’s five 3G operators as a record number try out the video services, which are available separately for a monthly fee of £5. The Sky Sports and News services gives live access to news and sport from Sky on a mobile phone while 24-7 provides clips of goal action during Premiership and Champions League games followed by highlights fifteen minutes after the final whistle. Hence O2 has made the conscious decision to carry the 24-7 service but not the live mobile streaming of television channels because it has concerns over the impact on network capacity and hence viewer enjoyment.

Sporting spectacle

While he will not be drawn on numbers, David Gibbs General Manager of Mobile at Sky reveals August was the biggest month for mobile streaming the broadcasters has ever experienced.

“The Ashes was a huge draw and it reinforced mobile as the third screen for Sky, after the tv and the PC,” he says.

“We had a record number of people signing up to both services and we had a record number of streams in August as the Ashes got really interesting and we had the first week of the Premiership.”

The claim has been backed up by Vodafone which has reported record streams during August which, at one stage during the Edgbaston test, reached a peak nine times higher than the operator had experienced before.

A constant stream?

The obvious question, then, is how this will affect network capacity and what experience can customers expect? Here, Gibbs claims, technology has helped greatly.

“Around February we rolled out H264 encoding which can compress video far smaller than before and we also get a better quality picture than before,” he says.

“So we’re confident that customers will still enjoy a good service because there simply isn’t a broadcaster offering a better quality picture anywhere in the world. We’ve certainly seen churn levels come down since we launched the new codec.”

A potential saving grace for Sky is that its research shows the average person consumes around ten minutes of live streaming content during each viewing session because, by definition, they are usually out and about and so just ‘snacking’ on content rather than watching a full event.

Pent up demand

By the time the World Cup kicks off in South Africa next summer Sky’s estimation is that the smartphone market will have grown by around 20% to 25% and so the potential market for sports video on the move will swell.

Interestingly, Sky experienced the biggest demand on mobile two years ago when England played Russia away in an ill-fated Euro 2008 qualifier. Due to the time difference, the game was played during office hours and so proved that there is a huge demand for mobile broadcasts of big football matches during the working day. This was not put to the test last year in the UK because the home nations did not qualify but with England looking almost certain to reach next year’s World Cup finals, there are likely to be several key games played during the afternoon that could attract unprecedented demand for live streams.

While Sky and the four networks which carry its live streaming service do not appear to be too concerned publicly about capacity issues, O2 has confided in SamKnows that it is and is keeping an eye on Sky’s television packages but would need to be convinced they would run smoothly across the country before committing to them.