Sophie Turner Laing

When the satellite platform Sky launched on February 5, 1989, with Sky Channel; Sky Movies; Eurosport; and Sky News, Europe’s first 24-hour news channel, British viewers had no idea what more was coming. The number of channels rapidly multiplied, and Sky built its reputation and business on two key constants: choice and innovation. In 1990, The Simpsons made its debut and became a megahit for Sky and is still on the air today. Later that year, Sky merged with rival satellite service BSB to form BSkyB and set out on a clear path toward growth.
In 1992, Sky began airing coverage of the new FA Premier League. In 1993, it launched its first multichannel package, which included Nickelodeon, UK Gold and Discovery Channel, and in 1998, Sky Digital launched with 140 channels.
Sky continued to ride the wave of technology, offering the U.K.’s first live football match streamed online, the world’s first interactive-TV news service and Europe’s first personal digital recorder, Sky+, which put Sky viewers in control of when they watched their favorite shows. The satellite platform has also been at the forefront of offering content on mobile, broadband and in HD.
As the managing director for entertainment, Sophie Turner Laing has overall responsibility for all Sky channels except news and sports, including Sky1, Sky2, Sky3, Sky Arts, Sky Real Lives and Sky Movies.
In today’s crowded media environment, which allows consumers to get content from myriad sources, platforms and devices, Turner Laing has one top priority: keep the customers satisfied wherever they may be.

TV EUROPE: A key goal for you has been putting entertainment at the heart of Sky’s content. Would you give some examples of how you’ve done this?
TURNER LAING: Sky offers the most fantastic array of different genres that make the day never dull! Because our news and sports programming are physically made on the premises here at Sky, there is a huge group of people living, breathing, making content for those two particular genres. [But] for entertainment, which is an equally huge area, we commissioned via third-party production companies through the independents. So entertainment didn’t necessarily have the same focus and impetus that I felt was a very important part of the whole ecology we have here at Sky, which is offering a real breadth of programming.
And Richard Woolfe [the former director of programming at Sky1] is leaving a fantastic legacy behind of really putting Sky1 back on the map as the home of entertainment. So, almost as a byproduct of the Writers Guild strike in the U.S., by default, we’ve had to focus on originating our own programming. And Richard’s real passion and experience is very much in entertainment. So we’ve had the arrival of shows like Gladiators and Noel’s HQ and Shane Richie doing Don’t Forget the Lyrics. That seemed to gel together with the other brilliant pieces of output we had as acquisitions, such as The Simpsons, the ultimate entertainment show that one could ever, ever want! It hits its 20th anniversary [this year], which is just extraordinary!
Alongside entertainment in the truest definition of the word on Sky1, we’ve been refocusing Sky Arts, adding channels, moving to HD and relaunching Sky Real Lives, which wasn’t much in the spotlight, and turning it into a channel that really had focus and ambition.

TV EUROPE: Well, you’ve been busy!
TURNER LAING: Yes, well, I’m never good at sitting here and twiddling my thumbs! And, my God, at Sky, this is not a place to put your feet up.

TV EUROPE: It’s a tough economy out there, and no one is sure at this point what expenses consumers will cut and which they will maintain. Some say families might cut their pay-TV subscriptions; others say no, pay TV is a tremendous value because of all the choice they get. And a pay-TV subscription provides more value than going out to a live performance or concert. What sense are you getting about the Sky subscribers?
TURNER LAING: We recently announced that we’re in more homes than ever: 9.2 million. And in every quarter last year, we grew more than in the corresponding quarter the year before. That is a fantastically good indication. However, we’re not complacent, because obviously this is an economic climate such as the country has not weathered in a very, very long time. This year is Sky’s 20th anniversary and we’ve got the most fantastic relationship with our subscribers because they are our customers. They happen to be an audience, but first and foremost they’re our customers. And we have a dialogue with them that is much closer than broadcasters have with their audiences.
Customers can join Sky for as little as 55 pence a day, which is the same as a can of Coke. And when you look at adding value—because value and satisfaction are absolutely our main KPIs [key performance indicators]; while ratings are an indicator they’re not the driver—the key for us is making sure that we always continue to give our customers great value, great breadth of programming and satisfaction so they stay subscribers and don’t churn. So, quite frankly, when everybody says, “Oh well, with arts programming you only get 20,000 viewers,” well, that’s 20,000 hugely
satisfied subscribers.
It’s a slightly odd playing field in that we’re always compared to terrestrial ratings. And yet, we’re in totally different business models. It isn’t really an apples-to-apples comparison. It’s not that I’m trying to avoid the ratings discussion; it’s a good indication, but it’s not our main driver.

TV EUROPE: What are you and your team doing to keep your customers satisfied and to provide them with programming that they can’t find anywhere else?
TURNER LAING: As far as entertainment goes, it’s about differentiating Sky from what is available on the other platforms. So for me the big challenge is, How do we create clear blue water between the free TV broadcasters and us?
Now, obviously, in sport and news we absolutely drive the difference. So what we needed were some very key hooks for the other channels. An example is how successful we’ve been with repositioning Sky Arts as not a niche channel that only three people who watch opera want to watch, but actually as a very broad-based arts channel, so that anybody, any age can enjoy the programming, which includes Songbook, our series in which some of the songwriting heavyweights reveal the secrets of their craft—we had Duran Duran in March; or Viva la France, our season celebrating French cinema, introduced by Antoine de Caunes. That’s quite a key thing about Sky: as a whole we’re very inclusive.
We don’t know better than our audience. So if we go back to value, there are a lot of things that are very easy to demonstrate. A subscription to Sky Movies, with more than 850 films a month, is significantly less than taking a family of four to the cinema once. The viewing experience we provide is an example of a way of delivering value and satisfaction. And we’re making an enormous push into HD, because high definition is something that we feel incredibly passionately and strongly about. And what is so interesting about HD is that it’s absolutely brilliant at highlighting what we’re fantastic at. Sports is a total given for HD; so are performances such as opera, ballet, theater, classical concerts, because watching them in HD is really like being there.

TV EUROPE: And once you get used to watching HD, there’s no going back.
TURNER LAING: What a lot of people forget is it’s also the quality of the sound. So much gets talked about the picture quality, which is fabulous, but actually it’s a combination of the picture and Dolby digital sound that creates this live experience.
And that feeds very well into Sky’s endless desire and ambition to innovate. Technology has always been very core to the company. We constantly set ourselves these huge challenges and hurdles about how do we push on. We are testing 3-D at the moment. So there’s no sitting on our laurels. It’s about saying, “OK, what’s next?” Which is part of the DNA of Sky.

TV EUROPE: Now there is a lot of debate in the free-TV arena about how to maintain public-service broadcasting in the U.K. It seems to me just from perusing Sky’s channels that you are fulfilling viewer needs across a whole wide range of genres, from drama to factual to the arts. That goes back to what you’re saying—that’s part of the value you want to offer subscribers, right?
TURNER LAING: Yes, absolutely. We definitely acknowledge that the BBC is the bedrock of public-service broadcasting. But we also like to highlight, which we don’t feel gets enough prominence and coverage, that our platform, if you look across the whole myriad of channels, does deliver some simply excellent programming. If you love natural-history programming, there are hours of it on National Geographic Channel. Not just the one-off spectacular film from David Attenborough—there are hours of very high-quality programming. You can go to the History channel or the Military History channel or our Sky Arts channel. And equally you look at children’s programming in the form of Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network or Disney Channel. We’re about giving people choice.
There’s a slight snobbery that multichannel is only repeats, or low quality. And low quality is such a subjective thing, because a lot of what gets talked about is how much you spend on the programming. It’s not how much you spend; it’s what you spend it on. Look at our output on Sky Arts, where there is The Book Show, which is the only book show
on British television. And that would sit happily at home on a terrestrial channel. And something as fabulous and unique as Ross Kemp: Return to Afghanistan, which has just started again, a terrestrial would absolutely give their eyeteeth to have that in their schedule.
So, this [idea] that multichannel is all cheap TV is actually wrong, because what we’re delivering is lots of programming for peoples’ various passions.

TV EUROPE: Sky has always been open to acquisitions. Are they still an important part of your schedule?
TURNER LAING: Yes, one of the five areas we have in our strategy for Sky1 is very much “The Best of the U.S.” And we are hugely fortunate to have shows like Lost, 24, The Simpsons, Bones, Cold Case, Fringe, which was our last season’s acquisition. And we just picked up Lie to Me, starring Tim Roth, which is getting a very good run on the back of American Idol in the U.S. at the moment.
In parallel to our strong U.S. acquisitions is our drama strategy, which we’ve developed over the last year or so. It was really fueled on the success that we had from doing the two-part dramas based on Terry Pratchett novels, Hogfather and The Colour of Magic. We are now embarking on a full-fledged drama strategy, looking at very high-end, event-driven programming, predominantly literary-based.
The first one after the Pratchett programs is Skellig, based on the David Almond award-winning book that is on the national curriculum for kids. It has Tim Roth as its star. So there we have serendipity. [Laughs] And that’s going to be closely followed by a drama based on the novels by Martina Cole. They are huge bestsellers here in the U.K. It’s very gritty, very explosive, very different drama, which we’re really excited about. We’ll be announcing more details on that soon. We’ve got a lot in development, from Strike Back, based on a book by Chris Ryan, to another Martina [project], to another Pratchett. So there is a lot going on, which is great.

TV EUROPE: Now, it’s said that if the audience doesn’t know where to find a program¬¬, it doesn’t really matter how good it is. What’s Sky’s general philosophy when it comes to on-air promotion, and what message do you constantly want to give your viewers?
TURNER LAING: The key is navigation: providing information about what the program is, what’s the story, what time is it on, what day. There are an awful lot of messages to get out there, but that’s where the Sky platform has a unique advantage—we have lots of technology to help with that, too. For example, Sky+, which is our PVR, is fantastically helpful. The bulk of our subscribers have Sky+, and what they view live is actually the most fascinating trend to be following. Because apart from sport and news, soaps like EastEnders, big entertainment shows, dramas like Lost, the majority of programs are time-shifted. People are watching when they want to watch. So that creates very interesting challenges not only for our promo guys, but also for our schedulers.
And also as part of Sky+, we have Sky Anytime, which is our partition hard-drive, which we use to push the weekly highlights. So in Sky+ homes that have this Anytime facility, Sky1 is the sixth-most-watched channel. And Sky Anytime is brilliant for highlighting programming from other genres on the EPG [electronic programming guide], such as History channel, Jetix or the Paramount Comedy channel. So it’s giving people a taste of a program that they may not have searched for though other pages on the EPG.

TV EUROPE: So you’re learning what your subscribers want to watch?
TURNER LAING: We’re very fortunate to have our Sky View panel, which is in 33,000 homes and is a fantastic commercial advantage. We really do know what our viewers are watching. It’s because we have this kind of retailer-customer relationship. It’s all about constantly staying aware and up-to-date on what our customers want.

TV EUROPE: What do you enjoy most about your work?
TURNER LAING: Never a dull day! [Laughs] It’s always different. And the great thing about Sky is you come in in the morning, and we could be doing something new all over again!