April 02, 2013

Sky Atlantic latest

HBO's excellent Game of Thrones returned for its third series on Sky Atlantic with a reported 710,000 viewers on Monday night. That's not quite the 743,000 it got when it first appeared a few years back but is up on its second series debut last year of 522,000. 
Those are big numbers for the Sky-exclusive Atlantic - 1,700% up on its slot average over the past three months, but still relatively small beer compared with the return of Jonathan Creek on BBC1 which pulled over 7 million viewers.
It was reported last year that Sky was planning to wholesale the channel (ie make Atlantic available to other carriers) once it was available on their IP service Now TV but, despite the occasional rumour, there is still no sign of Atlantic appearing for anyone lacking a dish.
Which is odd, as you would have thought that any new customers for Sky would have jumped on board by now and chances are that it's not that much of a retention attraction given that it's attracting audiences that are a small fraction of the overall Sky customer base. But Sky continues to pursue this viewer-depriving strategy. And frustrated VM customers continue to obtain that non-VM content by "other means". Surely it would benefit both Virgin Media and Sky Atlantic advertisers to open it up to 4m more homes? You would have thought so.
Meanwhile, the new series of Mad Men launches on Sky Atlantic on April 10th at 10pm. It will be available in the US two days earlier for those with US iTunes accounts or with "other means" for viewing the show.

5 comments:

amh15 said...

Non-movie content has not emerged on Now TV and things seem oddly quiet on that front. Do you think it's still coming? There doesn't seem to be any chat about it online (that I've seen anyway).

sibod said...

blinkbox is the only non HBO/Sky Atlantic Legal way of getting Gmae of Thrones, and one will have to wait around 6-9 months before S3 appears there, for £1.80 an episode, in SD, and with hardly any TV connected devices able to stream it.

metallicorphan said...

I went to SKY TV last week(I stuck with Virgin Phone and Broadband),and SKY made a bit of a boob IMO

They released Series 1 and 2 on demand the same day as the new Season 3 episode

so,at least in my case I have downloaded seasons 1 and 2 to watch and catch up before I watch the new episode,which I recorded

I wonder how many other people wanted to catch up with seasons 1 and 2 first?(yeah it wont be in the millions,LOL)



this sites word and number type in thing is getting harder and harder

Unknown said...

Sky just added Sky Sports to Now TV at the hilarious price of £10 a day (£300 per month). There's still no sign of any TV content appearing, and based on their sports pricing, expect it to be priced in the extreme end of things.

Other means on the other hand remain as easy to access as ever, and at an affordable price. Game of Thrones is apparently the most pirated TV show of all time. Funny that.

Unknown said...

Surely no-one in their right mind will subscribe to the ridiculously highly priced Sky just to see "game of thrones."I am a total fan of this wonderful show but after comparing prices I shall wait until the set is available to buy and will still be in pocket,!!or perhaps as an earlier commentor puts it find a "pirated copy"..............that'll show 'em, LOL.