Sky to offer a movie premiere every day with updated service

Sky is to replace its long-running Sky Movies service in the UK and Ireland with ‘Sky Cinema’, offering a new premiere every day of the week.

Sky Cinema will launch on 8 July and comes at no extra cost to subscribers. The change also means a larger library of films to choose from and HD will now be offered as standard to all customers on the Sky and Virgin Media platforms.

The idea is to bring major film releases closer to their cinema release, in many cases eight months, where they can be watched exclusively on Sky Cinema for over a year before they are hosted on other subscription services.
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Films to premiere include Spectre (8 July), Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (9 July), Steve Jobs (18 September), Bridge of Spies (30 September) and The Danish Girl (23rd October).

The Jungle Book, Zootopia and Captain America: Civil War are set to headline the Christmas collection.

To improve the HD, Sky is also using a new internal master format that provides a third more pixels and four times the number of colour shades of the current HD offered. Sky says this means “sharper and more vibrant pictures”.

As well as improved picture, selected movies on demand will also have sound “closer to cinema”. The sound range has been increased in part by taking the audio track straight from the studios. It means “louder bangs and quieter whispers” with no need for customer to make any adjustments to their TV.

All films will be available on 11 dedicated live channels, via on demand, or on the go through Sky Go and the dedicated Sky Cinema app. Sky Cinema is still the only subscription service that lets you download all films for offline viewing.