Igloo

» see igloo.co.nz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Sky Network Television owned pay TV in New Zealand and had for years, and the people it could not reach were the ones who would never sign a contract for it. Igloo was the answer to that: a joint venture with TVNZ, announced on 8 December 2011, Sky holding 51 percent and the state broadcaster 49. It was supposed to arrive in the first half of 2012 and did not launch until 3 December.

The deal was deliberately unlike a Sky subscription. You bought a Pace receiver outright for $199 and plugged it into an ordinary UHF aerial. Freeview's free-to-air channels came with the box and cost nothing forever. If you wanted more, you prepaid $24.99 and got thirty days of a pack that ran to about eleven channels, National Geographic and Comedy Central among them. Sport was pay-per-view through Front Row. When the thirty days ran out, nothing chased you.

Distance here is hemispheric rather than technical. Prepaid television was a familiar idea in Turkey too, where the satellite platforms sold cards and packages long before anyone streamed anything, so the shape of Igloo is legible from a long way off. The specific thing it was fighting is not: a country of four and a half million people with one dominant pay TV owner and a broadband rollout that was still catching up.

~ the record ~

~ fifty thousand, then nineteen ~

The target was fifty thousand boxes sold in the first twelve months. By 2014 the venture was looking at around nineteen thousand subscribers, well under half of what the plan wanted after twice as long. TVNZ sold its stake back to Sky in 2013 and walked out of the venture entirely in 2014, which is the clearest statement anybody involved made about how it was going.

The New Zealand business press reported the whole thing as a loss maker from fairly early. Regulators were a factor in why it existed at all, since a cheap, contract-free tier from the dominant operator is a good argument against being regulated as one.

~ what killed it ~

Netflix launched in New Zealand in March 2015. Sky's own Neon was already running by then and Spark had put Lightbox into the market. Suddenly the customer Igloo had been built for, the one who wanted television without a contract, could get it through a broadband connection they were already paying for, with no $199 box and no aerial.

Sky announced the shutdown on 8 July 2016 and gave it almost eight months of notice.

~ what happened to the receivers ~

On 1 March 2017 the pay channels stopped. The boxes themselves were not bricked. Sky pushed an update that left every Igloo receiver in the country working as a Freeview tuner, so the free-to-air channels kept coming, but without technical support and without the electronic program guide.

That is a gentler ending than most hardware gets when a service dies behind it. The box you paid $199 for in 2012 still turns on and still shows you television. It just stopped being able to sell you anything.

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