INSidER

Skydentity

The recent purchase of Easynet by BSkyB is obviously motivated by a number of well documented business reasons and looks to be a good move by Sky although i am not qualified to say whether the price is right.

What interests me is the history of Sky Interactive and the implications for that division.

I used to run a company that supplied Sky with mobile top up using the so called set top box "back channel". This was in fact a slow dial up internet connection running from the set top box and accessing web pages marked up in a variant of WML.

The interface was cumbersome and slow and not many people used it, but it did have a means of identifying the identity of the household in which the set top box was located. This was only available to Sky, but it proved very effective in cutting down fraud. You could know with absolute certainty that the set top box accessing your website was accessing from say 54 Lobelia Drive, Cardiff.

You would have thought that this advantage would have proven compelling. 

One of the problems with Sky Interactive is the fact you have a distributed data base of set top boxes that cannot be updated remotely and are really rather unintelligent devices. Even though the consumer owned those boxes, it was Sky that had sold them to them - so leaving the older boxes behind was not an option. Millions of hours must have been spent testing every Sky site against each and every set top box.

At one time not so long ago, we all looked at Sky's 7.8m UK households connected to Sky Interactive and the fact they had an in built charging mechanism and identity and thought it would be a close run thing between interactive TV and dial up internet connections.

Now most people would say TV type entertainment through the internet is a realistic competitor to TV but that internet through set top boxes was not a likely winner against the Internet. 

• Posted by roger on 07/01/2006.
• roger's site