Emma Lloyd
Speaking at a seminar organised by IHS in London, Emma Lloyd, Sky’s business development and strategic partnerships director, said that the first was having a big in-house engineering team.
The second was partnering with leading companies like Google and Facebook, along with traditional ones such as Cisco, and third working with start-ups.
In the latter case, she gave the example of Jaunt, a Silicon Valley-based pioneering cinematic virtual reality (VR) company in which it first invested a couple of years ago. By doing so, it got access to innovations earlier than it would have otherwise done.
Asked whether such decisions, which Lloyd said were strategic, were also insightful or commercial, she added that Sky measure then in terms of the value they brought.
She cited the examples of Now TV and how Sky had convinced Roku to white label their product, as well as Sky Q, which includes many components of start-up work, including curation provided by Pluto TV.
Lloyd also spoke about iflix, the Southeast Asia streaming service Sky entered into a partnership with in March. She said she had been told by iflix that they are not an Asian equivalent of Netflix. Furthermore, she revealed that Sky does not plan to expand to Asia.
Asked about animation and branded content, she said that in the former instance Sky has looked at a number of start-up but decided at this stage not to acquire any players. However, it will continue to invest in kids content.
In the case of branding, she said it is working as an advertiser, citing the example of Twitter, and also creating branded content.
