–Ian Valentine, the Exec in Charge of Sky Net, Discusses it with [itvt]
Last Thursday, UK satellite TV operator, BSkyB, launched a new interactive TV portal called Sky Net. The portal, which is accessed through the phone connection that is incorporated into all of Sky’s set-top boxes, currently offers a small selection of the hundreds of third-party Web sites that Sky says have registered for it to date. The sites are provided by traditional Web operators, retailers, non-profit organizations, special interest groups, local governments, and even individuals. Sky requires that all sites on the portal be adapted for television and pass an automated Internet-based test. The sites serve pages using the WTVML mark-up language, which Sky has published 
through ETSI as a common content format for interactive TV applications in Europe (note: WTVML is an XML-based content authoring standard for providing IP-based interactive TV services; in order to address the requirements of interactive TV, it adds various TV-related functions and layout control through a series of extensions, as well as providing traditional Web-based page layout control).
Sky subscribers can access sites by using their remote control or keyboard to type in a URL, or by entering a "SkyKey," a numeric shortcode associated with a site; they can also access Sky Net sites via a listings page and a search engine. The portal incorporates various personalization features, allowing Sky subscribers to, for example, save their favorite links and access a list of services they have visited previously: each member of a household will eventually be able to create an individual profile, where he or she can enter personal information to facilitate online transactions, using features such as auto-complete and auto-logon.
Testing of new services on the portal is accomplished automatically via the use of a "spider" that checks all sites for compatibility with Sky’s WTVML-based microbrowser and rejects those which do not comply or which contain errors or broken links. Sky is hoping that, by making the testing process for interactive services on the new portal much simpler than the manual SSSL testing process which its satellite-delivered services must undergo, it will make it easier for third parties to come up with innovative interactive content propositions for its platform. The process of offering sites on Sky Net is also greatly simplified by the 
provision of a Web-based management interface called SiteControl, which allows site owners to register, develop, test and launch their sites on the new portal, and also to access their sites on any Sky set-top or on their PC while they are under construction. While Sky is not charging site owners to use SiteControl or to offer their sites on the new portal, it expects to generate revenues through sales of SkyKeys (registering a SkyKey, for example, can cost anywhere from £2,500 to £25,000–the shorter the key, the more expensive it is), sponsored searches, premium telephony services and commerce fees. (Note: a rate card can be viewed at this Web page.
A number of companies are providing tools and other services to facilitate the development of Sky Net sites. Those companies include Tamblin, which is offering a software tool, dubbed i-ZoneTV On-Demand, for developing and publishing WTVML-based content; ArtemisCorp, which has teamed with Microsoft on CMS.RAPID, a content management system that enables development, deployment and maintenance of WTVML-based services, and that is based on Microsoft’s Content Management Server 2002; and Azoth, which is offering WTVStudio, a desktop development suite and editor for WTVML-based sites (note WTVStudio is offered in "Lite" and "Professional" versions that give site operators a choice between templated content formats and a more advanced editor with full preview and simulation capabilities; the "Lite" version is priced at £495 per year).
The day after Sky Net launched, the Sky executive in charge of the new portal, technical alliances director, Ian Valentine, spoke to [itvt]’s Tracy Swedlow about some of the more interesting sites offered on the portal, about why he believes the portal is generating significant interest in the IPTV space, about why he believes it will allow Web businesses to reach new customers, and more.
[itvt]: Your new, WTVML-based interactive TV portal, Sky Net, launched yesterday, correct?
Valentine: Yes. It’s been a hard road over these past few months getting this up, but we’re excited that it has finally launched. There are now nearly 600 sites registered, and we’re getting approximately 25 to 50 site registrations a week, which is awesome. There’s a huge amount of interest in new angles, like using it for user-generated content, extensions to mobile interfaces, clever marketing campaigns, retail offers, messaging, customer communications and customer service, as well as using it with programming…a lot of great new ideas. It’s as if people have discovered a whole new medium, which is very exciting. One thing that’s also exciting is that people in the broadband/IPTV space are very interested in what we’re doing, because they haven’t yet fully figured out what the mass interactive content proposition will be for IPTV, and they’re starting to realize that the kind of content that we’re getting on Sky Net is ideal to offer people over IPTV set-top boxes. We’re getting a lot of interest from the industry in how we’re making Internet infrastructures work properly on the TV, and in the standards and tools that we and our partners have developed.
[itvt]: As I recall, Sky Net was originally scheduled to launch late last year. Why the delay?
Valentine: We actually did launch last year, but kept it to registered developers only. Essentially, as far as our development community is concerned, we have been live for several months. Yesterday, we simply let the public in for the first time. Also, over the last three months, we have been doing a lot of internal work on creating the new Sky Networked Media division. It has involved a fair amount of restructuring internally, and the combination of that, a high workload with developers, and a fairly low budget for the project cost us a couple of months in getting the thing out the door. I’m happy with the end result, though. It’s very good.
[itvt]: Are viewers finding Sky Net?
Valentine: It’s still very early: we only launched the service yesterday. However, one thing we’re doing is offering a few thousand free remote controls with keyboards in them to anybody who enters the SkyKey, "REMOTE" (736683). We’re doing this because we wanted customers to start to understand what a SkyKey is and how to use it. Because once they get the concept of SkyKeys established in their thinking, it will be a really powerful marketing mechanism for site owners. And what we’ve seen so far is awesome. Basically, we have a fixed number of remotes to give away and now, after 24 hours, we’re nearly half-way through where we planned to be in a week. So there’s obviously no problem at all with customers understanding what a SkyKey is and using it.
[itvt]: How long does it take a site owner from first registering with SiteControl to having their site live on Sky Net?
Valentine: We’ve had several site owners build their sites in just three weeks. The bigger companies sometimes tend to get bogged down in the decision-making process, not in the build process. But if you have a site ready and it passes the automatic tests, you can move from site registration to live in under an hour.
[itvt]: How many SkyKeys have been reserved so far?
Valentine: Hundreds of SkyKeys have been reserved. If the site owners who’ve registered them want to keep them, they have to launch a site in Sky Net within 90 days of reserving the key.
[itvt]: What kinds of services are launching on Sky Net that have pleasantly surprised you?
[itvt]: What’s the business model behind that service? Another great site we’ve got is called TVGenius: it has TV program listings and a search engine. It fills a real need for Sky audiences, because you can go online with it and type in "soccer" or "space" or anything you want, and it searches all Sky’s program listings and then tells you when programs corresponding to those search terms air next on Sky. So it will say, for example, "Next showing on E4 on Friday at 9:00PM." We’d like to offer a service like that ourselves, but what’s happened is that someone has seen the need and built it before us. Which is great. [itvt]: How accurate is it in determining their location? [itvt]: Presumably, that raises some privacy issues… Valentine: The Internet-based registration process is designed to take care of that: when you register, your kids’ phones get a text that says, "Do you want to opt-in to this service?" and they have to confirm. Once that’s set up, you can just ping them whenever you want. As I recall, there’s a charge of 25p per request. [itvt]: What other memorable sites have you seen on Sky Net so far? [itvt]: Do you offer viewers a list of all the sites on the service? [itvt]: Now I understand that one of your target markets for Sky Net is retailers. I take it you feel that Sky Net will work a lot better than Open…, which also allowed retailers to set up storefronts. Valentine: Absolutely. The thing about Open… was that it tried to compete with the Internet rather than work with it, and as such it wasn’t open at all. Open… wanted to build and host a service for you–they would treat each retailer basically the same. They had something called the Standard Retail Infrastructure: basically, they created your storefront, and charged a lot of money to do so. It just wasn’t competitive with the Internet. What we’re doing now costs very little, and allows companies to leverage their existing e-commerce offerings. I believe that Sky Net will be of considerable interest to Web retailers and to any company whose business depends on the Internet: there are around 60 million people in the UK–so approximately 23 million homes. Sky’s service is available in more than 8.1 million of those homes, which means that Sky Net can be accessed in more than a third of UK households. Remember that there are a lot of people in the UK who have Sky, but who still don’t have Internet access–I think something like 40% of UK households still aren’t connected to the Internet–so, if you are a retailer that is doing ecommerce on the Internet, creating a presence on Sky Net allows you to reach a lot of potential new customers. This is important, because Web site operators see attracting new customers as their main challenge. They’ve figured out their business models; they’ve figured out their inventory; they’ve figured out how they differentiate themselves from their competitors on the Web. But now they have to figure out how to reach more customers, and that’s what a service like Sky Net is doing for them. Clearly, if they are going to expand their ebusiness offering, the only way they’re going to be able to do that is by getting onto new devices. And the set-top box–a device that sits in people’s living rooms–is a device that it makes a lot of sense for them to expand onto. I think a service like Sky Net potentially appeals both to Internet laggards and to early adopters. It will appeal to the laggards, because it gives them a lot of the functionality of the Internet, and it’s easy, they don’t have to buy a PC, and it’s included free with their Sky subscription. But I believe Sky Net will also appeal to people like me, who are tech-savvy and have a wired lifestyle: I use my PC a lot to surf the Internet, but, when it’s convenient to do so, I also use my mobile phone. So sometimes I’ll sit in my living room and check the Internet on my mobile, even though I have a PC in the other room. So I expect that a lot of viewers will use Sky Net in the same way: even though they might be used to using a PC and the Internet, they will, for example, use the TV to quickly check their eBay account during the ad breaks. We’re not trying to compete with the PC, obviously. We just realize that people have interactive needs, and that sometimes they have a need when they’re relaxing in their living room and, say, their PC is in the other room and being used by their kids. [itvt]: What are some of the established companies that are offering sites on Sky Net? Valentine: Reuters, John Lewis Partnership, Waitrose, Europecar, The Financial Times, and many more. [itvt]: In an earlier interview [see [itvt] Issue 6.17], you mentioned that Sky is suggesting a business model for subscription-based Web sites, where they would use premium-rate telephony on Sky Net to offer their content on a pay-as-you-go basis. Have any Sky Net sites implemented that model yet? Valentine: No, This and some other more advanced features are dependent on the future release of SiteControl Pro, which is currently in testing. [itvt]: Is Sky interested in "promoting" successful Sky Net services to Sky Active? Valentine: Absolutely. We expect successful or even simply topical Sky Net sites will find themselves linked to from many different places on our platform, including Sky Active and broadcasters’ red-button menus. However, this would normally require a separate agreement with the broadcaster or portal operator. [itvt]: As WTVML is an open standard, would it be possible for other operators–for example, ntl/Telewest/Virgin or BT–to offer Sky Net sites under their own brand? Valentine: Yes, this is theoretically possible, and may happen as more and more content becomes available in the format. In general terms, creating interoperability for public services deployed via the TV, using a common content format, must be seen as a good thing for the overall health of the interactive digital television industry. URL: Sky Net Portal Info Click http://www.itvt.com to subscribe to our free email newsletter, which contains all the news stories you see on this Web site, and additional breaking news and scoops, in-depth features, interviews, screenshots, videos, and other exclusive content you will not find anywhere else. 
Valentine: Well, there’s a Reuters news feed site that’s an excellent little service. They’ve put a WTVML wrapper around the Reuters RSS feed, and it gives you constant live news and images. Another service that has surprised me is called Pop-i. It’s a user-generated content idea. It’s basically a single phone number that you can send a picture message to from your mobile phone. As soon as you do that, your picture message appears in a moderated group of images that you can view on the TV. You can send in pictures from wherever you are–say a Rugby match–and share them with the world. The really cool thing is that it remembers the mobile phone numbers that send the pictures in: so, if you know your friend’s phone number and you enter it into the Pop-i service using your remote, you can see all the picture messages they’ve sent in. In other words, it automatically organizes viewer-submitted photos into albums. It’s just a really cool user-generated-content and community-oriented service.
Valentine: I’m not sure what their business model is. To be honest, at this stage I don’t really care that much. The thing that’s so exciting to me about Sky Net is that there are so many things that can be done. It means that various commercial barriers preventing more companies and individuals from getting into interactive TV are now gone–and that’s going to lead to a lot more innovation. I think what you’ll see happening is what happened before on the Internet: people innovate first, and then they figure out the business model later. I think it’s great to have that kind of culture in interactive TV, because we–speaking from the point of view of the industry in general–have been so "tied up," as it were, trying to work out the business models before we went out and did anything that we sometimes ended up hardly ever doing anything. Now we’re seeing the opposite of that: we’re seeing people do things because they can be done. Really, you don’t have to worry too much about the business model: Sky Net is just not very expensive to do. 
Another great Sky Net service is called "KidsOk." This service is based on the location-finding services that mobile phone operators offer. Now, you have to register for the service on the Web, simply because the registration process is fairly complicated–it requires permission from your kids. But what it does, if your kids have mobile phones, is that it allows you to keep an eye on them. You can log in from your TV–it remembers the set-top box associated with your family’s mobile phone numbers–and you simply enter "ping Nicola" or "ping Steve," or whatever your kids are called, and it comes back with a map showing where their mobile phones are, so that you can see where they are. Once you’re registered, it only takes a couple of clicks of the remote control to do this.
Valentine: It depends where they are. In rural areas, the cells cover a wider area than in urban areas. So it depends on the granularity of the mobile phone network. Typically, if they’re in a city, it will give you a little map of where they are, that’s accurate within 2-300 yards. 
Valentine: Let’s see. Well, there’s a site that two autistic children have built that provides information on autism. There’s another site that features a village in Norfolk where the coast is being eroded by the sea: they’re trying to raise awareness of the need for coastal defenses, and so their site has a Web cam that shows you houses in the village that are about to fall off a cliff. There are a whole load of computer agencies that have set up sites advertising their wares. There’s a group called StartHere that has one of the richest sites: 44,000 pages about various diseases and lifestyle issues. There are just a lot of things going on–I myself find it hard to keep track of all the sites on the service. I was recently doing a demo in front of the CEO and the board of directors of one of the biggest catalog retailers in the UK: I did a search on some terms that they suggested, and I ended up finding a site that I didn’t even know was there, and that turned out to be a really good one.
Valentine: We do have a "What’s Hot" list. At this point, the sites listed on it are randomly selected. There are 20 services listed there now.
Filed under: Features
