Sky Angel

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

~ the eulogy ~

Sky Angel sold lifetime subscriptions. You paid once, with the understanding that the dish on your roof would keep working for as long as you did. That is a remarkable thing for a small company in Naples, Florida to promise, and the way it eventually failed to keep that promise is most of why people who remember Sky Angel remember it with an edge.

The service launched in 1996 as a Christian satellite platform carried on EchoStar III, with a lineup that reached 36 channels by late 2002, twenty of them television and sixteen radio. It reached around 115,000 subscribers, concentrated in the central United States, in households that wanted a channel list which had been chosen by somebody with their values rather than by an advertising department. For a product with that much purpose behind it the economics were brutally ordinary. EchoStar III aged, and replacing it meant spending roughly $400 million.

So on 1 April 2008 the satellite business ended. Sky Angel sold its DBS frequencies to EchoStar and told its customers to move to the internet service it had launched the previous July with NeuLion. Lifetime satellite subscribers found that their lifetime did not transfer. The company took real criticism for that and never fully put it down.

A Christian television package aimed at the American middle, sold by subscription to households with a satellite dish, has no version of itself that lands in Ankara. I am writing about it because of what happened next, which is one of the clearest cases on record of a company being killed by a definition.

~ the dossier ~

~ the dish years ~

The early history has one detail too good to leave out. On 22 January 2007 Sky Angel signed a partnership with a company called ShifTV to deliver its service in Canada. By October the partnership had dissolved, because ShifTV had restructured itself to launch an adult pornography service. The Canadian expansion ended there.

The American internet service went live on 10 July 2007 and grew past eighty channels by 2010. In September 2012 came Sky Angel 2.0 and Faith Everywhere, which put the lineup on an iPad, and a secular spin-off called FAVE TV. Faith Everywhere reached Roku in June 2013. On paper this was a small company doing the internet television transition early and competently.

~ the mvpd question ~

In April 2010 Discovery Communications pulled its channels from Sky Angel. Sky Angel filed a program access complaint with the FCC, which was the mechanism Congress built precisely so that a small distributor could not be starved of programming by a large one. The FCC denied the request for a standstill and then stopped to ask a prior question: was Sky Angel a multichannel video programming distributor at all?

The regulation had been written with cable in mind and assumed a physical transmission path. Sky Angel had no path. It sent its signal over whatever broadband connection the customer already had, which meant it looked less like a cable company than like a website. The Media Bureau could not resolve it, partly because the answer was going to apply to every streaming service that came afterward. Google took an interest for exactly that reason. The question was still unresolved four years later.

There was a separate fight with C-SPAN, which in 2009 shut off its feed three days after turning it on and was sued for it. In 2015 Sky Angel told a federal judge in Maryland that Discovery had canceled its internet license only after Dish complained about not having the same rights.

~ the last signal ~

Sky Angel suspended its television service on 14 January 2014. The reason it gave, recorded in its complaint to the FCC, was that it could not offer a competitive product because it could not acquire programming on fair and nondiscriminatory terms, and it could not compel those terms because the commission had never said it was entitled to them.

Three in-house channels carried on inside Dish packages for several more years, the children's channel KTV among them, and accounts agree they went dark in January 2019 without naming a source for the date. The irony is cheap but it is real: YouTube TV launched in February 2017 and nobody asked whether it had a transmission path.

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