Sophie Turner Laing

As BSkyB celebrates its 25th anniversary, Sophie Turner Laing, the managing director of content for Sky’s portfolio of channels, speaks to World Screen about the value of putting customers first, delivering the best content and innovating continually.

WS: Much of Sky’s success is due to the relationship it has with its subscribers. How does that relationship inform your programming decisions?
TURNER LAING: It’s important to remember we’re a retailer and not a broadcaster, so needless to say, we need to have an incredibly close relationship with our customer marketing group. They are involved from the very early stages, particularly in the big bets that we’re placing in content. We rely on Stuart [Murphy, director of entertainment channels] and his team to find and polish those crown jewels, but ultimately there’s no point in us spending all this money on original content if we’re not going to tell our customers that it’s there. The customer marketing group works with us on all the communications from press to marketing to digital to whatever, right from the very early stages. Our independent producers are pretty impressed by how coordinated we are. And obviously, because we have a lot of trackers and customer responses, we can use the insight that we gather from our customers when we’re looking to commission the second series. Which characters resonated really well? What would they like to see more of? What did they not like? It’s fascinating to see the very visceral responses that you get from your customers, who are very, very media savvy, and our harshest critics if we get it wrong.

WS: What have you learned from how your subscribers are accessing Sky content outside of the linear feeds?
TURNER LAING: It’s important to realize that we have more than 5 million broadband customers, which is incredibly rapid growth in a relatively short period of time. And we’re the U.K.’s biggest connected TV service. Literally one of the key USPs [unique selling points] for our customers is giving them the flexibility to watch the content where they want to watch it. If you look at the increase in on-demand, it’s very rapid, but I always want to temper this slightly. It is brilliant, and in fact, Sky content in Sky homes on-demand does better than any other content, which means we’re finding the right stuff. But it’s also important to realize that in the U.K., on-demand viewing is about 6 percent. There’s still a hell of a lot of eyeballs going to linear TV. The U.K. has a daily average viewing of four hours plus. Linear TV is still a big, big percentage and we need to deliver that. From our big sports matches to breaking news, we are still relevant on the main screen. Obviously the transition to more on-demand and more choice is just happening; there is no turning that tap off in a million years. How we make it easier, faster, more responsive to our customers, is a key focus.

WS: Sky has a partnership with HBO, which you have recently expanded.
TURNER LAING: We have extended it to 2020, a very long-term deal for all of us, which is brilliant! It’s been a totally terrific partnership, literally from day one, as two pay operators with very aligned goals, very similar tastes, very focused on delivering the best. Obviously HBO has been going for slightly longer than us in really high-end drama—we’ve had a lot of learning from them. The important bit for me with the HBO deal is the co-production element that we added to it. So, as well as extending the deal, where we remain the home of HBO till 2020, there is also a very large commitment to co-producing a number of what I would say are epic-scale mini-series. HBO have got this fabulous reputation. If you think Game of Thrones, Band of Brothers, that’s what we’re going to work incredibly hard on, with Mike Lombardo, the president of HBO Programming, in how we take content to yet another level.

WS: It’s been about a year and a half since Sky Vision launched into a very crowded market. How has the company been received?
TURNER LAING: It’s just over a year old and going great guns. We have really driven the library hard. They’re working very closely with all our new commissions. We have our biggest investment in drama—I’m not going to tell you how much we’re investing, but let me assure you it’s a telephone number—on Fortitude, which Fifty Fathoms is producing for us, it’s being shot in the U.K. and Iceland. And then we have Critical also being shot, which I believe is on the biggest stage for a drama because it allows for continuous shots, à la West Wing. It is being written by Jed Mercurio and is just incredible. Think 24 meets ER.

WS: Sky celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. If I can ask you to be an ambassador for the entire company for a moment, what would you say are Sky’s major accomplishments?
TURNER LAING: It feels so grown up! At our heart, we still think of ourselves as the truculent young teenager. It’s always brilliant in these kinds of occasions to slightly turn the clock back. If you think about when we started in 1989, there were just four TV channels and a handful of news bulletins at fixed times and occasional live sport. Now, obviously spin forward 25 years, the explosion of channels and choice and delivery methods and different screens is just phenomenal. The other thing that’s important to remember about Sky is that we’ve grown beyond just being a TV business. We maximize our content through technology innovation and we’ve indeed grown into the wider communications business with Sky Broadband and Sky Talk. So it’s a very different world 25 years on. And I’m sure just as exciting as it was then.

WS: Perhaps more so, given how many platforms and devices you can play with today.
TURNER LAING: I think Sky is one of those incredible companies—it is genuinely the most perfect marriage between technology and content. One doesn’t drive the other. It is genuinely in tandem. What I love about being at Sky, and I’ve been here for 11 years, is the sheer energy and curiosity that everybody has. There’s a very special DNA at Sky that is quite unlike any other company I’ve ever worked for. If you go back to the band of pioneering and brave mad Aussies that started it all up, I’d like to think there’s an element of that incredible can-do culture that the Australians are very well known for. We hope we’ve never lost that. And it’s always looking forward rather than backward, never resting on your laurels and just being brave, on the basis of, what’s the worst that could happen? For the 25th anniversary we’ve been communicating across our own staff, everything from, what are the 25 must-see Sky shows to the must-have Sky products. Even our product list has grown so enormously in 25 years. We have 25,000 staff at 25 sites, which is very, very different from when we started. And one of our big pieces that Jeremy Darroch, our CEO, kicked off is, under the auspices of our Sky Academy that we launched very recently, we’re supporting 1 million under-25s across everything from apprenticeships to work experience to whatever it may be, which is amazing.

WS: You’ve been investing heavily in original British content. Tell us about your relationships with the U.K.’s creative community, and how you’ve been attracting the best talent to Sky.
TURNER LAING: There are several elements to that. Firstly, it is very driven by people and relationships. With Stuart Murphy [director of   entertainment channels] and the channel heads and the commissioning team—I’m talking about the entertainment channels, not sports and movies here—I absolutely know that we have the premier league of content teams. Whether that is drama, comedy, factual or entertainment, we literally have the brightest, most agile minds. Remember five years ago it was quite a different story. Under Stuart’s leadership in this area we have really put the battery levels on full go. At the end of the day, very talented creatives—and there’s not 100 million of them out there—want to feel they are in partnership with a team or an entity who trusts them, who doesn’t want to micromanage them, and who encourages great creativity, but still with a focus. Ultimately, we’re a commercial platform, but we have the advantage of having a portfolio of four very different channels, so therefore the talent can create and produce across a wide range of audiences and genres. Ultimately, it just has to be more fun to produce for Sky.

WS: Would you give us some highlights of the slate?
TURNER LAING: There’s a great slew of content. Like all mothers, you can never have favorite children, so I have to be slightly careful about which ones I mention, otherwise it gets perceived as if those are my favorite ones! All the channels over the next year will have the most wonderful array of new content and that is across all the genres. We’ve got Fleming, our new drama, for Sky Atlantic. We have The Smoke, a new big drama from Kudos for Sky1. We have the very lovely and charming Doll & Em for Sky Living, which for us is a great first because we also sold it to HBO, who are not particularly known for buying in a lot of content. We felt that was a great feather in our cap, because obviously we’ve had a very long relationship with HBO. Then Sky Arts, we’ve just finished our Portrait Artist of the Year, which some journalist described as the Great British Bake Off of painting! The thing that really excites me about Sky Arts is not only do we have the very wonderful Harry Shearer doing Nixon in Nixon’s The One, we have a slew of Playhouse Presents, which is where we attract the most incredible talent, both on and off screen, to come and do these half-hour plays. The lineup is simply extraordinary.

WS: Even with this new push toward original productions, what role do acquisitions play in your bouquet of channels?
TURNER LAING: Well we’re still very proud that the tag “The Best of the U.S.” sits with us and in pay TV. It’s a very important genre for our customers, who love American shows. We are waiting with desperate bated breath for Game of Thrones in April! It’s going to be absolutely fascinating to see how the zeitgeist U.S. show, certainly of the last four years, really takes off. We’ve had amazing viewing in on-demand recently as people are catching up on the back series.

WS: Tell us about your European co-productions, like the one you did with CANAL+, The Tunnel?
TURNER LAING: That was totally fantastic. What was really rewarding about it is that it was a great success for us and a great success for CANAL+. It’s one of the most unique co-productions ever because it was genuinely written half in English and half in French. Nobody has ever done split language. And hats off to the Sky drama team and to Kudos, the indie who produced it, because these things can be very complicated beasts to run and they did a fabulous job. The Tunnel did great numbers for us, great numbers for CANAL+, and we have more in the works with them.

The thing that I loved about Game of Thrones—which is shot in Belfast—and also we had with The Tunnel is that we had huge casts of Europeans. That brings a whole new array of fresh faces to the screen. So as well as working with the very best of British talent and new talent as well, having that European angle gives us a different flavor from the free-to-air channels.

WS: What growth opportunities do you see for your group in the next 12 to 24 months?
TURNER LAING: As a platform, it’s not only about the Sky wholly owned channels, it’s also very much about our partnership with our partner channels, everyone from Discovery to Disney to A+E to National Geographic. They also are investing more in British production and we can't forget that our customers join us for a breadth of content, and particularly in the factual genre, which is not an area that we have really any wholly owned channels, those big brand names deliver a very big and important amount of programming for us.

The other thing is, Dracula was a co-production with NBC and we’re currently co-producing Penny Dreadful with Showtime, which is being shot in Ireland. As well as our focus on acquiring shows, there is increasingly this co-production effort, partly to get real scale on screen, which is expensive, but equally to have talent from both sides of the Atlantic involved in making these shows even bigger and better than they would be.

WS: The U.S. networks are certainly more open to co-pros than they’ve been in the past.
TURNER LAING: It’s interesting. NBC has really been the first network for us. Years ago we also co-produced Battlestar Galactica, which very few people knew. There are more people demanding great content, so finding these ideas is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack. So we just need very good needle finders!

WS: American broadcasters are also opening up more to shorter-run limited series, which the Brits have been doing for years. I imagine that also opens the door to more co-production opportunities?
TURNER LAING: It also gives you flexibility to make sure that you do the right episodes for the material, rather than necessarily fitting it into a particular block or length. Some shows may end up resting at six, others at eight, others at 12. It’s all driven by the narrative; not by, it must fit into a slot.