The other day I tried to assuage fears that every decent US TV series was going to disappear from free to air screens following Sky’s deal with HBO for the next five years.
Today, I’m not so sure. Seemingly Sky is attempting to do similar deals with Showtime and AMC. That would be a disappointing state of affairs if it happened. And I speak as someone who already subscribes to Sky.
What does concern me more is the way Sky plans on packaging these programmes. It seems they want to put together a “premium package” to gain new subscribers. But I think that really means they want to charge me more than I currently pay. I don’t buy their movie packages as I basically don’t watch them enough to make them valuable. Indeed the onset of cheap films, and services like Lovefilm or even iTunes, means that movies is not the premium offering it once was.
I think Sky might be trying to put together a “Sky Premium US TV” channel which could run interruption free as Sky Movies do, but will cost more. I moaned when Sky put The Pacific onto their movie channels, and they did the same with the Clone Wars cartoon series.
If Sky does tie up these deals, as well as causing problems for the BBC to an extent (although they have to cut back on imports), C4/E4/More4 and Richard Desmond’s channels, they must surely bring closer the day when they have to have their distribution and channel businesses broken up.
And perhaps it’s about time Sky actually went out and made some British TV series. Yes they make an annual Terry Pratchett mini-series, the odd marquee offering at Christmas with appropriate big names, and a few comedy offerings. But drama has been really lacking. They burnt off Strike Back, their SAS series from Kudos, over three weeks by running double episodes, but aside from the forthcoming Thorne adaptions based on the Mark Billington novels, there’s not a great deal going on (Update: They’ve reordered Strike Back for ten more episodes. How about running it over ten weeks Sky?). Let’s face it, Sky’s most talked about series in the last year has been Pineapple Dance Studios, and that doesn’t quite fit the picture they’re painting.