Sky plans Internet link for free-to-air service

net1

Customers of Sky's proposed free-to-air satellite TV service will have access to thousands of Web-based business and personal home pages under a project codenamed Sky Net, which will be unveiled in the next few months.

The company has been working for the past year on the plan, which offers the potential to derive greater revenues from its 7.3m existing subscribers as well as those paying the one-off £150 fee for the new free-to-air proposition.

Ian Valentine, Sky Interactive technical alliances director, stressed that the intention was not to offer Web through TV, but to provide business and consumer content based on a Web-derived programming language developed by Sky.

This Web TV markup language (WTVML) has recently been accredited by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, giving it the status of an open standard available for use by all European digital TV platform operators.

Sky will appeal to businesses in the next few months to make the necessary modifications to their existing Web content in order to make it accessible via the WTVML browser on which much current interactive TV content relies.

'We're not trying to do the Web on TV, but if 7.3m Internet-compatible devices don't represent an opportunity to kick-start some new easy-to-use content, then I don't know what does,' said Valentine.

He said there was no reason Sky's free-to-air customers wouldn't get access to these services, nor why they should not be available on other devices.

Lancelot

Wasn't that the evil self aware computer system that started the end of the existence of mankind in the terminator movies ??

Some things never change......

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I've got an inferiority complex, but it's not a very good one.

rolfw

LOL, just a tad of paranoia creeping in there Launcelot.

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