Sky España

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

~ the goodbye ~

Sky launched in Spain on 11 September 2017 with no dish and no installer. It was an app and a web player at 6.99 euros a month, billed monthly, cancel whenever you liked, and it was Sky's experiment in selling itself as pure internet television in a country where it had no pay TV business to protect.

The content was what a mid-sized licensing budget buys. Around a dozen live channels at any one time, Fox and National Geographic among them, plus a catalog that at its widest held fewer than fifteen complete series. Sky put its own productions in there, Gomorra and El Milagro, and held Spanish exclusives on Criminal Minds and Scandal.

There was never a route by which any of this could have reached me. Sky has not sold a subscription in Turkey, ever. By 2017 the Turkish market had Netflix, which had arrived the year before, with BluTV and puhutv as the local answers, and pay television here still meant Digiturk and a dish on the balcony. A British brand selling a dozen channels in Spanish at seven euros was a product for exactly one country, and not mine.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the room it walked into ~

Spain in 2017 was already a hard room. Movistar+ had the football and the telco bundles, Netflix had been there since October 2015 and was spending, and HBO España had opened in November 2016. Amazon Prime Video opened in December 2016. Sky arrived last.

Against that it offered twelve channels, a maximum resolution of 720p, no Chromecast support and a short list of supported apps. The price was the argument and the price was not enough. There were carrier deals to widen the funnel, including a Yoigo bundle that brought it down to six euros, and none of them changed the shape of the thing.

Sky never published a subscriber figure for Spain, before or after. Its own line on the closure was that the service had not delivered the performance expected of it.

~ we want your last weeks to be free ~

The wind-down was unusually decent and it is the part worth keeping. Sky announced on 23 July 2020 that the service would stop on 1 September, and in the same breath stopped billing. Monthly renewals from the 23rd onward were free of charge and nobody was charged in August at all. The message to customers said Sky wanted their last weeks to be free.

Content began thinning on 10 August as the licensing agreements expired one at a time, so the final three weeks were a catalog visibly emptying while nobody was paying for it. Access held until midnight on 31 August. Sky came back to Spain in 2023 inside SkyShowtime, a joint venture between Comcast and Paramount. Part of the word survived. The service did not.

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