Sky Active

» see sky.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Sky Active only existed if you had a Sky Digibox with a phone socket behind it, which meant it only existed in the UK and Ireland. This was not a website that happened to be popular in one country. It was a service that physically could not leave, because the box was leased with the subscription and the return path was a phone line dialing into Sky's own equipment. Everything about it was licensed and carrier-bound, regional right down at the hardware layer.

It started in october 1998 under the name Open...., built by a company called British Interactive Broadcasting that BSkyB owned a third of, with BT holding another third and Midland Bank and Matsushita splitting the rest. The pitch to those partners was that the television was the computer most British households actually had. Open sold home shopping and home banking through it, with travel bookings alongside, and HSBC really did run a bank branch you reached by pressing a button on a remote control.

By 2001 Sky had bought out its partners and relaunched the whole thing as Sky Active on 1 october, which is when the interesting part starts. Around the same time the interactive layer got serious: online betting had gone live in december 2000, and in june 2000 Sky had bought the WTVML microbrowser out of WapTV so the set top box had a proper markup language to render. This was a real applications platform, and almost nobody outside two countries ever saw it.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

Sky Sports Active is the part that justified the whole apparatus. During a Premier League match you could switch to a different camera, bring up the stats, or run the Fanzone commentary where two supporters shouted at the game instead of professionals. That was genuinely ahead of the web at the time, because in 2002 no website in the world was going to hand you a live alternate camera angle over a phone line. The television was still the fastest pipe into a British living room and Sky was the only one using it as an interface.

Everything else piled in behind it. Sky News Active with its own headline grid, email through talk21 and Yahoo and Demon accounts, ringtone downloads and text messages typed on a remote control, Sky Vegas and At the Races taking bets, and Sky Games, which came out of Sky Gamestar in april 2007 and gave a generation a puzzle game called Beehive Bedlam that people still ask about.

~ the fall ~

The whole model rested on the television being the best screen in the house with the best connection behind it. That stopped being true in Britain sometime around 2005, and after that every service on the platform had a better version of itself sitting on a laptop in the same room. Banking through a remote control cannot survive a bank website. Shopping through a remote control cannot survive Amazon. The retailers and banks noticed first, and they left one at a time.

Sky started sunsetting the interactive services from 2011 onward and did it quietly, closing them in ones and twos with no announcement anyone outside the platform noticed. Sky Games and Sky Active were the last two left standing, and they went together on 31 january 2015. The red button survived, but only as what it was originally, an extra feed rather than a place you could go.

~ what got buried with it ~

For me this one is a story about a plug I never had. In 2001 I was at university with a PC and a TTNet line, and the problem Sky Active solved, getting information onto the largest screen in the house, was not a problem I had, because the largest screen I cared about was the monitor. British households got interactivity through the television first and the computer second, and that ordering produced an entire commercial platform that has no counterpart anywhere in my own history of being online.

What died with it is a specific idea that everybody has now quietly abandoned: that the operator who owns the pipe should also own the applications running over it. Sky built the walled garden properly, with a markup language, a payments layer and real retailers inside it, and it still lost to a general purpose network that was worse at all of those things and open to anybody. Every carrier portal of that era lost the same fight. Sky just held out the longest.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »