Sky's the limit

A couple of notable news items today around the UK satellite TV provider BSkyB. In the morning, the Guardian ran a story that said Sky was in talks with Microsoft to offer its proposed DTT service over its new PC-based TV platform. The DTT service that Sky hopes to launch, pending approval from regulator Ofcom, will see the provider use MPEG4 technology to put four pay-TV channels into the spectrum currently being used by Sky to offer three free channels over the DTT service, which is sold as Freeview in the UK.

If it happens, it will be an interesting step in the convergence of media in the UK. Although Sky, which is 39.1% owned by News Corp., bought a broadband service provider a couple of years back, it is using this asset in its consumer business primarily as a triple play bundle. Putting its channels on Microsoft's Windows Media Centre will be the first time that the provider actually attempts to offer its services to the PC.

It also builds on the announcement Sky made last week that it would provide its premium channels to Tiscali for its IPTV service.

Presumably both of these moves are being done for Sky to test the broadband waters rather than really hope for big paybacks for the services. Indeed, if reports from moneysupermarket are to be believed, there's such a speed gap between what consumers are being promised and what they are getting that it may be a while because PC/broadband-based television services really take off in this country.

The other Sky story is that this week it launched a counter attack in its ongoing fight with cable provider Virgin Media over whether the latter was right to claim that Sky was really abusing its market position in negotiating over channels (or not negotiating, as the case may be). If the UK courts rule in Sky's favour after all, it will likely have a negative impact on Virgin Media's bargaining position in the future, not just over channels but for the price at which it potentially gets sold.

UK: Google: pole position, Facebook: shooting star

News today that Google has managed to hold on to its top spot yet again in the rankings for most visited web property in the UK, bringing in some 28m visitors to its web sites in May 07, according to figures from comScore. Microsoft and eBay were ranked second and third, with 27.4m and 22.2m respective visitors to their sites. Yahoo was in fourth place with an estimated 20.6m visitors.

Interesting to note that Facebook had the biggest growth in traffic of all sites. Between April and May of this year, traffic on the social network went up by 30%, and comScore says Facebook's traffic has gone up by 2,123% over the last year. Despite this, with visitor numbers totalling 4.8m for the month of May, Facebook still doesn't make the top-20 rankings for the UK.

Part of the explosive growth surely must be down to the company having recently opened the site to new members--in the past it was restricted to people with college/university email addresses. That makes me wonder whether its growth will be sustainable in the longer term.

The way Facebook allows users to invite the entirety of their email address books in one click has definitely been used a lot lately. I'm not a high-volume Internet community type myself, but even I have had loads emails saying I've been added as a Facebook friend to other people's pages. (Each invite requires me to click in and approve the friendship, meaning more traffic for Facebook.)

When Google bought YouTube in 2006, there was a lot of speculation over whether Yahoo or a big media player would buy up Facebook. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has said he doesn't want to sell, but if this momentum keeps up beyond the 'signing up' stage, I won't be at all surprised if this actually happens.