Premiere to become Sky Deutschland

• New service to be called Sky
• Improvements for customers will begin in July
• Premiere AG to start trading as Sky Deutschland AG, subject to shareholder approval
• Extraordinary write-off of the Premiere trademark
• No impact on existing customer contracts

http://info.premiere.de/inhalt/static/img/bildteaser/logo-sky_184x112.jpg

http://info.premiere.de/inhalt/eng/medienzentrum_news_uk_14052009_2.jsp

It will happen in July. Premiere currently have the following branded channels.

Premiere 1
Premiere 2
Premiere 3
Premiere 4
Premiere Filmclassics
Premiere Filmfest
Premiere Nostalgie
Premiere Sport Portal (includes between 1 and 10 sport channels depending on what sports are ongoing, includes every Bundesliga match)
Premiere Direkt - PPV Movies
Premiere HD
Premiere Erotik
Premiere Sport

Sky Italia has been moving towards the same model as Sky UK, they have just started a Sky One style channel in Sky Uno. Germany may also try and follow the Sky UK model but it is a totally different market with hundreds of FTA satellite channels the Pay-TV market at the moment isnt anywhere near as big as in the UK or Italy.

Very true, I think Premiere is the only Pay TV service in Germany that does have a following, it's either FTA or just plain old Subscription, no Mid-tier pay TV as you say like here. Probably more because of the amount of FTA channels established from RTL and ProSieben.Sat1. Although it's good to see Sky make a go of this I just can't see it working like it does here.

I think its just the Sky brand that Sky must be licensing Premiere. It's now 30% owned by News Corp though, Sky Italia is 100% owned by News Corp.

Sky have announced the packages today:

Basic package - Sky World (SkyWelt)
Sky Film Package - SkyCinema, SkyCinema +1, SkyCinema +24, SkyAction, SkyComedy, SkyEmotion, SkyNostalgie, SkyCinemaHits, MGM and Disney
Sky Sports package (Sky Sports 1, Sky Sports 2, Sky Sports Austria)
Sky Bundesliga package (Sky Sports Bundesliga)

Total package cost is 54.90 euro and I think 5 euro extra for the HD package:

Sky Cinema HD
Disney Cinemagic
Sky Sport HD
Discovery HD
National Geographic HD
History HD

Sky UK branding seems to be used instead of Sky Italia - http://twitpic.com/61lyq

from a branding point of view, it will be interesting to see how the channel logos and brands will differ from the UK ones, and if they will be extending the lowercase sky logos to the channels, and the corporate typeface.

The channel data has already changed, as the channels now belong to a bouquet called SKY, it looks the channels will use the corporate sky logo but I think this is the only thing in common, their promos also use a specific font and has been used in their promotional literature in german media.

Sky Deutschland has now started, all the channels are using the corporate typeface, sky sports is called sky sport and the logo is not the uk one, its pretty much still using the same infrastructure but the name has changed.

some idents & promos:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=tvfanhun&view=videos

Not much of a surprise that the Sky Film channels idents are very similar to Sky Movies' idents, albeit using the lower case Sky logo.

Their sky film channels are using the same idents as sky movies in the UK, all-be-it with their own logos animating on in a similar style, and the corporate logo animation which proceeds all their channel idents...

sky film emotion = sky movies drama
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOr-vu2IL0Q - sky emotion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHHCF0xMlDY - sky drama

sky film cinema = sky movies premiere
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2cX_a - sky cinema
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iesmLwMhDIw - sky premiere

Moving on from the film channels, you have sky sport and sky krimi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElBIvE5r1c4 - sky sport
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW-NIjxJxng - making of the sky sport ident
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCOgzUnWUGo - sky krimi

Sky Box Office is named sky select

They've made better use of the corporate sky logo over there, only sky sports in the uk uses the corporate sky logo.

You mean the prelude idents of the glass logo on black?

I would like to see something like that over here. A set glass logo intro (it looked good with The Take) which animates into the channel ident.