Sky Arts goes FTA

A&E Is the main decision maker in the joint venture

No but it is not supposed to be. It is more profitable than it used to be, though.

It helps that Tesco are gifting them studio space.

Sky News has always been a loss leader. Criticise Murdoch all you like but he fought to keep Sky News on air in its early days when everyone told him to close the channel, he persisted and it remains an extremely valuable asset to Sky and now Comcast. Comcast appear see the same value with Sky Arts, more so in this supposed upcoming review for public service broadcasting review. As much as I have enjoyed Challenge over the years, Sky Arts is a better use of bandwidth than Challenge. (Assuming Challenge gets the bullet from Freeview.)

You don’t have to be Art fan to like Sky Arts, it makes and shows some excellent documentaries about musicians and comedians. That and usually an old Queen concert gets shown about once a week.

Agreed, Sky Arts has been more accessible since Sky replaced Artsworld with it. The classic pop concerts will go down well with the BBC Four audience who already enjoy classic TOTP for example.

Just wish we were past the point of SD channels launching on Freeview. This is exactly the sort of thing that should be in HD (although Sky would have reasons for it not to be FTA), and I kind of wish we'd do what the French did and basically shut down Freeview then reopen it as an HD only platform with channels having to claim the slots again.

Ooh! That would be cool!

I remember back when we had Sky flicking between the Queen concert on Sky Arts HD and Sky Arts SD to show my father (a big Queen fan) how much better HD channels were in terms of quality as he always watched the SD version of channels because he found them first and didn't know (or more likely didn't care) that there was a HD version (this was back before Sky did the HD swap). The difference was night and day, the SD picture was atrocious, so if Sky Arts is going to go FTA, my only hope is for full SD resolution and a decent bit rate because some things are gonna look god awful if they just make it FTA as is.

Bit of an odd one, this, and I'm happy to be corrected on it, but:

The licence states that the multiplex "shall implement" the carriage of three Sky channels, and that at least "one quarter" of the available capacity is used for services not connected with Sky.

So the limit was never strictly three slots, just up to 75% of the bandwidth. This is how Sky proposed to switch to MPEG4 and broadcast more channels in the same amount of space when they were thinking of launching "Picnic" (which eventually morphed into what is now Now TV) while remaining within their licence terms.

Of course, when a multiplex could only carry four channels, the situation was much more straightforward!

With the advent of "progress" on the mux, where they can squeeze in more channels, the three Sky channels when Freeview launched had the best SD quality possible, compared to now where Sky News is a blurry mess.

It’s bad on Sky too. I’m even more annoyed about it because they stream it in HD for free on YouTube, but if you want it in HD on Sky, you have to pay extra.

Why do Sky stream Sky News on YouTube when they can't show ad breaks? Surely they are losing ad revenue from those who stream on YouTube instead of watching it on TV?