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It’s a Picnic for Sky
(02-10-07) - Details of Sky’s new “Picnic” brand, offering standalone broadband, TV and home phone have been officially released.
The service will launch under the new brand name Picnic, as rumoured earlier this year and will allow customers to choose any combination of the three services on offer.
Using the same broadband network as Sky (www.Sky.com), Picnic will offer speeds of up to 16Mb to the 70 per cent of the country covered by Sky’s unbundled exchanges. This means that customers will no longer have to take Sky TV in order to get its broadband.
It will also launch TV and home telephone services.
Sky has not said when it plans to launch the new brand, since it is waiting approval from Ofcom on the way it plans to deliver the TV branch of the service. However, customers can pre-register their interest at PicnicNews (www.PicnicNews.com).
The planned Picnic TV service will be available on Digital Terrestrial TV - but would be in MPEG-4 format instead of the standard MPEG-2.
Using MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2 will allow Picnic to fit more channels into its service but would mean that anyone wanting to receive the service would need to buy a new set-top box even if they already have a Freeview box, hence the wait for Ofcom approval.
The channels will include Sky One, Sky Movies, Sky Sports 1, a children’s channel and a factual channel, and customers would still be able to receive all the Freeview channels.
Michael Phillips, BroadbandChoices.co.uk product director, said: “Sky’s broadband rollout went a lot smoother than some other providers who branched out into the broadband market from home phone or mobile.
“Having added over 700,000 broadband customers in under a year, Sky’s broadband has proven very popular. However, it is likely to cost more as a standalone product so it may not prove to be as competitive without a bundle to back it up.”
Pointing out the fact that customers are not obliged to take any service in order to get another, James Murdoch, Sky chief executive, said: “The launch of Picnic will be a big step forward for customers who are hungry for value and simplicity. We are looking forward to the conclusion of the regulatory approval process so we can get going delivering a great service and real savings to customers.”
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