Sky hopes for digital video revolution

By Nick Higham BBC media correspondent

I started wondering whether digital television represented value for money when I realised I was paying BSkyB £50 a month, or £600 a year - without even subscribing to any of Sky's sports channels.

I thought about acting. But my 16-year-old son is now as tall as me, and I wasn't sure I could withstand the furious assault from him and his sister when I told them they'd have to live without Jackass, Extreme Sports and endless reruns of Buffy and MASH.

Sky Plus lets viewers record onto a hard drive

Thankfully Sky itself came to my rescue at the start of October, reducing the monthly payment by £10 to a still substantial £480 a year.

My problem: I had a Sky Plus box, a personal video recorder or PVR for which I was paying an extra £120 a year on top of my channel subscriptions.

The extra cost of the box may be one reason why only a meagre 105,000 of Sky's seven million subscribers have opted for Sky Plus.

But there's another possible reason: consumer confusion about just what PVRs like Sky Plus and its rival, Tivo, actually do.

Three years ago in a speech at the Edinburgh Television Festival Greg Dyke boldly predicted that PVRs would revolutionise our television viewing and undermine the economics of advertising-supported channels by allowing us to record programmes and skip the commercials.

So far the promised revolution has failed to materialise, on either side of the Atlantic.

Favourite shows

Research last year by a digital consultancy called Decipher suggested that was partly because of the difficulty of communicating just what PVRs do.

They record programmes like a video; they automatically record episodes of your favourite shows; and they allow you to pause and rewind live TV.

Decipher found that once people had been shown all this they got very excited, but they needed a demonstration to get the point.

Now Sky is having an expensive stab at overcoming the problem.

The company is spending £20m on a marketing campaign for Sky Plus with the slogan "Create your own TV channel", designed to highlight the "core message" that these machines allow you to record your favourite programmes when you're not around and watch them when you want.

Sky is spending £20m on an ad campaign

As one reader of this column observes, Sky has come up with "one clear, sexy and tangible benefit".

"It may be the last roll of the dice for PVRs," he says, "but I wonder if they've rolled a six? It feels like what the BBC did for Ondigital -- take a muddy proposition, boil it down to one clear and appealing message, and market it to billy-hoo, transforming Freeview in the process."

We'll have to see. Meanwhile the Higham household still has its Sky Plus box and peace, mercifully, reigns.

A version of this article appears in the BBC in house magazine Ariel.