Sky News | General Discussion

Sky feels so different from years past. Wow what a snoozefest.

Here’s hoping NBC spices things up a bit from presentation and anchors.

Sky News used to have all the "extras" that made them stand out, like the Sky News Active, the HD channel with the extra informations sidebar, the online stream with extra content during the ad breaks... And probably something else too.

And all that's long gone, the HD channel is now just a simulcast, the Active vanished years ago and the online stream is the same as the main channel only without the adverts. To think all the innovation there used to be and now it seems limited to "let's remove the HD from the DOG".

Ah well.

Though in their defence, I’d say that Sky News Raw was an innovative way of celebrating their 30th birthday.

There did use to be a "backstage" stream on the Sky News Active service, that and also on occasion a shot of the gallery too.

Sky News certainly felt confident in the 90s and 00s. The 2005 revamp was the very slow progression from big and brash to the minimalist pres style we have today.

The glass box seems to benefit only the company who can show off to clients that daytime rolling news is coming from a non-descript area of Sky Central, rather than for the benefit of staff and viewers, while the secondary studio is functional, but not much else.

Replacing the bland on-screen graphics may go some way to refreshing what is personally the blandest pres to date.

I wonder if it could be argued that the period they had from before the 2005 revamp was pretty much as big, brass and bold as it could possibly get and anything that would come later would always look a bit crap by comparison?

There are a few examples in TV presentation as a whole where one presentation package was really good and anything that came afterwards was going to be hard to match, the classic example here is the 1999 Carlton set - so good even Carlton would have struggled to find anything better.

To me it seems like they threw the baby out with the bathwater. They dumped their style and "legacy" of being this punchy, innovative, but modernly populist and very British broadcaster. But without being BBC-stuffy. All that was dumped for a plain white boring graphics and stiff writing and soul-less sets. If they wanted to the "Apple-esque" modern anesthetic, seems to be there may have been a better way to go about it.

I also think a lot of issues with Sky News, the sets and rebranding were all done minimally or on the cheap because they knew they were going to be going up on the auction block soon. Perspective buyers owners don’t want to see a lot debt or expenses (which is why you see layoffs and corners cut) when buying a business. Additionally designers may not have wanted to go all out with a new design when there was a very real possibility that the new owners would bring in their own people to redo the design.

Citation needed.

But punchy (or OTT) just isn’t our thing in this country any more. Granted Sky haven’t got it quite right, but we’ve moved away from the era of sweeping camera shots, VR helicopters in front of the desk, and all the other gimmicks that add very little but require a lot of resource.

It’s not worth a citation because it’s my opinion. When some businesses go up for sale they cut out the fat. Univision who is in a load of debt had laid off 250 people as it was rumored that it was shopping around for a buyer.

But here’s an article about Univision cutting fat when there were rumors of a sale... https://www.forbes.com/sites/veronicavillafane/2018/04/13/layoffs-at-univision-cause-panic-as-staffers-told-catastrophic-cuts-are-imminent-to-slash-300m/