Advanced Television

Sky’s Lewis: ‘UltraViolet not consumer ready’

April 17, 2013

By Colin Mann

Although admitting that digital content ownership ecosystem UltraViolet was of interest to Sky as a means of continuing to make its movie content more widely available to its customers, Ian Lewis, BSkyB’s Director of Sky Movies and Sky Box Office has suggested that it is not yet ready for deployment by the satellite broadcaster.

Speaking at the PEVE Entertainment 2013 conference in London, Lewis said: “If it takes me four to five minutes to explain to my CEO, it’s not ready for the public. That’s four minutes more than you get to convince consumers.” According to Lewis, UltraViolet was “not quite there yet” and needed needs to be simpler and more customer-focused.

His assertion echoed comments from a Consumer Panel made up of 18-year-olds earlier in the conference, when none of them confessed to having heard of UltraViolet. Revealingly for content owners and platform operators, a number of them also admitted accessing content illegally, with as much as 50 per cent of their consumption coming from such sources. A subsequent panel of 50-year-olds was similarly unaware, but only one of the seven admitted pirating content.

Lewis suggested that piracy was largely driven by lack of availability of attractive content. His mission was to develop new ways to make it easier, not harder to obtain such content, giving customers more ways to watch. These included online service Sky Go and rental service Sky Store.

Categories: Articles, Content, Piracy, Rights