Sky has unveiled further details of the company plans to offer broadband, telephone and digital terrestrial television services under an entirely new brand to customers across the United Kingdom. The new business will operate under the Picnic brand offering customers a variety of simple, flexible options to combine the services that they want. Building on the success of Sky TV, Sky Broadband and Sky Talk, Picnic will offer customers an easy way to benefit from value and innovation in home communications and entertainment and will take advantage of Sky’s capabilities in areas such as marketing, content and customer service and its existing infrastructure including an unbundled telecoms network that reaches 70 percent of UK households.
Key features of Picnic will include: TV, broadband and telephony; combo choice of 1, 2 or 3 services; up to 16 Mbps download speeds; instant access to improved TV selections; access to Freeview channels; and popular channel availability. The decision to proceed with the launch of Picnic is subject to the outcome of The Office Of Communications (Ofcom), the UK’s communications regulator, review of the proposed increased choice of TV programming. Ofcom has said it plans to launch a consultation on the initial license changes later this autumn.
Customers will access the Picnic TV service through a new generation of digital set-top boxes. The new boxes will help to lead future innovations on the digital terrestrial television (DTT) platform such as the adoption of MPEG-4 compression standards, which allow viewers to benefit from an increased choice of channels. The Picnic TV service will initially consist of 3 MPEG-2 video streams but, subject to approval by Ofcom, Picnic aims to move to MPEG-4 and add a fourth channel dedicated to Sky News.
Continuing with the existing “horizontal market” model for DTT equipment, the Picnic compatible boxes will be produced by multiple manufacturers and sold by a variety of retailers. The initial manufacturer will be Sagem and it is expected that others will follow shortly after launch. In addition, Picnic aims to make its TV service available on future generations of PCs—Isleworth, United Kingdom
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