Advanced Television

Sky Italia marks 10 years

July 24, 2013

From Branislav Pekic in Rome

sky-italia-hqSky Italia has used the occasion of a press conference to mark its ten years of operations to reveal a number of statistics and make key announcements.

Andrea Zappia, CEO of Sky Italia, said that Italy would remain an interesting market for the media sector “but we need to approach it in a different way… It should be let free to develop itself,” he added. “The TV market has changed incredibly in the last 10 years… We are moving towards a single entertainment market in which you compete in order to capture people’s attention. In Italy, content is still sold on a platform basis, a useless thing,” he asserted.

In terms of key numbers, Sky Italia has invested €1 billion in technology, produces over 39,000 hours of programmes, with €148.5 million invested in original productions in the past year, and €5 billion invested in Italian football from the start until the season 2014/2015. The cost of the basic package of channels in ten years has dropped from €22 to €19. There were 4.78 million subscribers at 31 March 2013.

More than 10 per cent of Sky’s total audience comes from non-linear viewing. More than 1.6 million subscribers have access to Sky Go (more than 500,000 accessing for the Germany F1 Grand Prix). 700,000 Sky subscribers uses Sky On Demand and every week more than one million items are downloaded,

According to Zappia, Sky Italia plans to add new channels, such as Fox Sports, Moto GP and Crime Investigation, and Sky TG24 HD. He did not exclude the launch of a 4K channel in the future.

Categories: Articles, Broadcast, Pay TV