SkyView Research Discussed At MRG Evening Meeting

At last night’s MRG evening meeting, Lucy Bristowe and Stephen Murfet presented the latest findings from the SkyView research.

The SkyView panel is made up of 33,000 Sky households, and of these, 10,300 are Sky+ homes, 3,400 are HD and 8,200 are PVOD (Push Video-on-Demand) enabled homes, using Sky Anytime.

The research has shown that the longer people have had Sky+, the more likely they are to watch timeshift programmes. Original Sky+ trailblazers who signed up in 2001-2002 timeshift 25% of their viewing, while newer Sky+ subscribers from 2008 only timeshift 12% of their viewing.

The most timeshifted channel across September 2008 was FX, with 40% of its viewing being timeshifted, mainly dominated by the second season of popular American drama Dexter. SkyView can also pick interesting trends on non-BARB reporting channels, such as StarPlus, a Bollywood soap channel which has 27% of its output timeshifted.

Sky is now beginning to encourage agencies to look beyond the overnights, as an increasingly large percentage of overall viewing figures for a programme does not come from the premiere transmission.

The research shows that 64% of playback tends to be on the first day, with 91% of all viewing measured by the end of the nine day BARB consolidated viewing cut-off.

However, bigger memories and hard drives in Sky+ boxes means that this may have a knock-on effect on people watching programmes later and later, and therefore the viewing measured by BARB becomes increasingly less complete.

The research also shows that during timeshifted viewing, 70% of all adverts are fast forwarded.

Much of the 30% of ads that are claimed to be watched during timeshifted viewing are thought to be during live/paused viewing, where people can forget they are in timeshift mode and therefore less likely to fast forward.

One concern for Sky is that by offering such an array of places to watch each broadcast programme – premiere channel, +1 hour channel, repeats in the same week as well as Sky Anytime – the power of the original broadcast is diluted and the appeal to advertisers is lessened.

Advertising is being sold on Sky Anytime in the form of 30 second pre-roll and up to three minute post-roll ads, which is going some way to monetise any possible loss in revenue that Sky is anticipating it could face.

Sky: 08702 40 40 40 www.sky.com