Sky Italia has made a number of important announcements on the occasion of its 10th anniversary.
The first was that it would launch Sky TG24, the first Italian news channel to broadcast in HD, on September 24.
The second was the launch of Sky Loves Kids, a ‘walled garden’ option for its kids programming, and the third that it will start to carry Fox Sports HD from next month.
Others include the launch of a Moto-GP dedicated channel, the Fox Crime Investigation channel and making Classica, Sky Italia’as premium channel dedicated to classical music, opera and ballet, accessible to all subscribers and in HD.
Sky Italia also provided the following key statistics:
€10 billion invested since 2003. In the last fiscal year, Sky invested 1.08 billion in Italian audio-visual products (more than 100 million euro in the cinematographic sector and almost 150 million euro in original productions)
4.78 million subscribers (at 31 March 2013)
6,500 employees + 13,000 people working with Sky
180 channels – 57 in HD (61 in September) and 1 in 3D
55% of subscribers have a MySky decoder
More than 10% of Sky’s total audience comes from non-linear viewing
Increase of the shifted viewing of the main TV series (i.e. that of Grey’s Anatomy went from 26% in the 8th season to 35% in the 9th season, that of Game of Thrones went from 26% in the first season to 36% in the third season)
More than half of the audience of many Sky titles comes from shifted viewing
More than 1.6 million subscribers have access to Sky Go (more than 500,000 access for the Germany F1 Gran Prix)
700,000 Sky subscribers uses Sky On Demand and every week more than one million contents are downloaded
Average audience share at 9%
Speaking at the conference marking its 10th anniversary, Andrea Zappia, CEO of Sky Italia, said: “Italy will remain an interesting market for the media sector but we need to approach it in a different way… It should be let free to develop itself.
“The TV market has changed incredibly in the last 10 years… We are moving towards a single entertainment market in which you compete in order to capture people’s attention. In Italy, content is still sold on a platform basis, a useless thing.
Advertising: “Sky Pubblicita’ [Sky Italia’s advertising arm] is outperforming the market, which is experiencing a double-digit decline, because it offers a valuable audience and it sells not only advertising spaces but also more innovative and complete products”.
