Picnic Shelved

I never knew that it had been given the working title “Picnic”, but it seems that Sky has decided to put the whole venture on ice.
Let me explain, 18 months or so ago, Sky suddenly announced that it wanted to take its three current Freeview services – Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Three – off the Freeview platform, and use the space to put four or so new subscription channels on in its place. It would use a higher spec of encoding that would mean consumers needed new boxes to both decode this, and to provide a slot for their subscription smart cards.
Ofcom wasn’t too happy and the whole thing disappeared deep into Ofcom’s Southwark Bridge offices for further consultation. Sky was an original partner of Freeview, and suddently DTT wouldn’t quite be so free.
The cynic in me thought that this was a chance to get back at Setanta who was soon to be launching with Premier League football. And due to their tie-up with Top-Up TV, they’d be on Freeview, unlike Sky.
At Sky News, they were a bit unhappy as not only were they off Virgin Media (and still are, I believe), but now they were coming off Freeview.
Ofcom has quite forceably responded to Sky’s press statements regarding the suspension of development work on Picnic. In particular they highlight a tardiness on Sky’s part to get responses to them on deadline and in full detail.
So a questionmark must hang over how serious a proposition this ever was. On the one hand, the venture had employed as many as 70 people (doing what, exactly, beyond technical work and responding to Ofcom, is a little unclear)., but the original hope had been to put something in place in time for the start of the last football season. The idea was surely to confuse a marketplace that Setanta was then entering into.
I suspect that Sky is now not so fussed about Setanta. They’ve certaininly come out well following last week’s debacle. As yesterday’s Observer noted, they’ve made Rupert Murdoch look like the good guy.
It’ll be interesting yet to read what Ofcom has to say, but adopting MPEG 4 still feels like something to do further down the line, when Freeview HD starts. Still, it’ll be worth watching what happens to this most popular of digital television formats.


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