Exclusive Interview: Sophie Turner Laing

PREMIUM: BSkyB is one of the leading pay-TV services in the world. As Sophie Turner Laing, the managing director of entertainment and news, tells World Screen Newsflash, its success is due to offering the best services, the latest user-friendly technology, a variety of high-quality imported and original programming and keeping customers satisfied.

WS: How important are on-demand services to Sky subscribers?
TURNER LAING: Our [personal video recorder] Sky+, which we introduced some years back, has been an enormous success in allowing our customers to have control and flexibility over when they watch. And also we have both a push and a pull VOD in Sky Anytime and Sky Anytime+. Sky Anytime is where we push the highlights of the week to the set-top boxes. There is a separate piece of the hard drive that has the new films, the new first episodes of series, which are changed on a weekly basis. It’s not a huge amount of programming but it’s a way of being able to say to our customers, since we’ve got 600 channels, “Here are some highlights to have a look at.” …And we’ve built on this even further with the launch of Anytime+, which is our on-demand service, made possible because our boxes are Internet enabled. It gives people access to movies, box sets, entertainment and documentary programs when they want and is already used by over 800,000 households. We’re giving customers the ability to define their own experience— watching what they want, when they want.

WS: You recently introduced Sky Go.
TURNER LAING: Sky Go launched in July to all 10 million Sky television subscribers at no extra charge. It’s brilliant because it allows you to watch live TV on the move on devices including laptops, PCs, Macs, iPods, iPhones, etc. It’s particularly suited to sport— for example, cricket is played during the day when a lot of fans are at work. On laptops and computers, customers can access more than 30 live channels, including all five Sky Sports channels, Sky News, Sky Movies, Sky1, Sky Living and Sky Arts, supported by an extensive library of on-demand content.

WS: Tell us about your remote-record app.
TURNER LAING: To me this is just genius! If you have forgotten to record a show, you program your PVR from your phone or from your PC at work. How absolutely brilliant is that? I promise you a child of 2 could do it. You just need a Sky ID and password.

WS: Has this type of authentication been a problem with your customers?
TURNER LAING: No, not at all. Our first venture into this was when we launched Sky Player some years ago, which is our PC service. We acknowledged that not everybody has multiple televisions in their houses, so if football was on the main screen then the kids could go watch a movie on a PC, thereby utilizing other screens in the house. So that was a very, very early step. But our feeling is our customers pay us monthly and we should make our content available for them not just on their TV screens but also on their laptops, tablets and smart phones. We have one of the most secure platforms in the world so we are absolutely vigilant in making sure that if our content is enabled on your iPad or whatever device, it’s as secure as we could possibly get it. We are creators of IP and are now very determined to grow our original production business. We have to protect our content from piracy. Being a platform and a content creator puts us on both sides of the fence, so it makes us think slightly differently than others.

WS: What is the strategy for providing your original programming to over-the-top services?
TURNER LAING: We have always widely distributed our channels. The Sky channels have been on the Virgin platform in the U.K. from time immemorial, so we accept that not everybody is necessarily a Sky household. Sometimes you’re in a block of flats and you’re unable to put up a dish, so there will be other providers; they could be over-the-top or VOD via cable. But whatever the platform, the prerequisite is that they need to offer a high-quality experience. We spend an inordinate amount of money investing in HD, so other platforms need to present the content as we would expect to see it on our own, which can be difficult for some of the over-the-top services. The platform needs to be secure so it doesn’t undermine the value of our content and we need to be able to reach a wholesale agreement in which the partner pays the fair price for the content that we have to offer. We have a very competitive market here in the U.K., and competition is fantastic for the customer because it makes all of us step up our game.

WS: You have revamped your entertainment lineup.
TURNER LAING: When Sky initially launched we were absolutely focused on sport, movies and news, all of which were not as well served by the free-to-air broadcasters. That goes to the heart of Sky, which is we want to give our customers the very best choice of content. We have delivered fantastic supertankers in sport, movies and news, but it’s fair to say that our entertainment offering was not nearly as strong as it should have been. In February, we totally re-launched and repositioned our whole entertainment portfolio. We bought the Virgin channels, which included Sky Living. We did the deal with HBO, which then spawned Sky Atlantic and we committed to giving much more support and attention to Sky Arts, which although it was an existing Sky brand and had cut through just brilliantly, it was probably not as loved or supported financially as it should’ve been.

WS: What are your criteria for launching a new channel?
TURNER LAING: The key is understanding what customers want and value. As you know, we have 600-plus channels on the platform so there’s no point for us to simply replicate an existing one. It’s about finding those niche areas where we add value for existing customers whilst reaching out to more people who haven’t yet chosen pay TV. We had already started delivering some fantastic British content on Sky1 and Stuart Murphy, who heads the channel, had really positioned it as a very credible entertainment offering. But there was a point where there were some dramas and some factual pieces that were not a natural fit for Sky1 and [didn’t make sense if it wanted to] maintain its entertainment moniker. When we [were considering] Sky Atlantic, we saw that there was a gap in the market. There was an amazing supplier in the form of HBO, who still produces some of the best programs in the world. Sky Atlantic just felt like a natural fit. Likewise Sky Living is a channel dedicated to our female customers—something that we felt was missing from the portfolio. It’s like a magazine in tone, which is why I hired Jane Johnson, who launched some of the U.K.’s biggest magazine brands, to run it. The content is a mix of fashion, celebrity, real-life, drama and comedy. And as it’s a channel “brand” there are opportunities to engage with the audience digitally and through brand extensions. The great thing about Sky is when it decides to do something it absolutely goes after it and gets it done!

WS: You have also ramped up your original productions.
TURNER LAING: Sky is one of the biggest investors in homegrown content. We invest £380 million a year in origination for our wholly owned channels—and we will increase this figure by more than 50 percent over the next three years. So by 2014, Sky will be directly investing £600 million a year in origination. Where we’ve really come on in great leaps and bounds is scripted. We’ve been the home in the U.K. for the best of U.S. programming for a very long time and that still remains a very, very important genre for our customers. But there is no doubt that locally produced content also resonates in a totally different way with our customers, with familiar surroundings, familiar actors, familiar themes. Anne Mensah, who is our new head of drama, has the most amazing and exciting challenge: how do we get drama in the kind of numbers that are worthwhile, rather than in two, three or six episodes, which is the usual amount [commissioned] in the U.K. And Lucy Lumsden is in charge of our comedy strategy where we literally have one new episode of British comedy for 52 weeks of the year. We’ve gone from a total of zero episodes to one every week for a year and that’s phenomenal. And we know that some will be totally brilliant and others won’t necessarily resonate as highly, but we have to carry on pushing the boundaries and really delivering to our customers content that they just can’t see on other channels.

WS: That’s the key of the whole offering, right?
TURNER LAING: Yes, absolutely. If you look at pay offerings around the world—whether it be Starz chomping on the heels of Showtime and HBO to DIRECTV getting involved in programming, albeit in a small way—pay channels have got to stand out above the crowd. So it’s very important to us that we deliver these kinds of big event pieces alongside the week in week out content staples. The channels are greedy beasts and we need a lot of carbohydrates for them to survive on!

Strike Back recently aired on the re-launch of Cinemax. It’s our first co-production with HBO and it’s not part of our output deal. It’s really fascinating to see that despite having a relatively new reputation in the scripted business we are going absolutely gangbusters in delivering high-end shows that sit just as easily on both sides of the Atlantic.