Sky Q

The UK's largest pay-tv broadcaster Sky, delivers entertainment directly in to 12 million consumer homes nationwide. With annual revenues of £12.9 billion, it’s also Europe’s leading investor in television content.

People watch more TV now than ever before and more screens enable us to watch more content in a variety of ways. Widely available broadband has turned our televisions into playback devices to video we can play anywhere. Video content no longer feels tied to a location. A programme is no longer just a programme, but a point in the story, that you can watch on a big screen, interact with on a tablet, or snack on with your mobile.

Sky has a history of being at the forefront of innovation – as CEO Jeremy Darroch put it: “from satellite to streaming Sky has led the way”. But the days of a single TV provider and a single set-top box delivering your TV experience are gone.

Users—and Sky—must wrestle with any number of boxes from tech players and gaming businesses (TiVo, Apple TV, PlayStation, Xbox), with competing interfaces and overlapping content and services. In all the confusion, Sky could become just another service among many.

The technology we have today is the result of the dreams and aspirations we had as children. We imagined flying machines and talking computers, we fantasized about a world of robots in books and films. Technology has become the greatest enabler of our time and the driving force behind our vision of modernity. With each new generation, we can see the ideas that will shape the future of the next.

We want to design a premium experience that takes into consideration all technological, consumer and competitive trends in the marketplace to deliver the complete Sky experience. Explore the evolving landscape and deliver a vision of how Sky can be at the centre of the connected home: What should Sky mean to its customers in this new era?

As part of the core design team responsible for ideation and development of the new Sky Q set top box experience, UI, remote control and architecture, I helped define a path forward for what Sky could potentially become. A future that would embed Sky much further and deeper into people’s lives… by becoming the guardian of our home. Someone we trust to be in control of an eco-system of smart products, that coordinate and choreograph activity around us, so that we have more time to relax and enjoy cutting edge, high quality entertainment.

Sky was already provider of high-speed fiber Internet; Connector to a range of devices and apps; and creator of high quality, wide ranging content. And from our early research we learned that even with the explosion of second screen devices, TV was still the number one platform for visual entertainment, a sacred space at the heart of the home – and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

To maintain the living room TV at the centre of the Sky experience, TV would have to find a way to integrate deeper into people’s lives, without becoming burdensome to manage. Sky could do this by:

· Shifting from a ‘box experience’ to a ‘trusted guardian’.

· Expanding beyond the living room to connect everything in the home across TV, console, phone, tablet, desktop and wearable.

· Being the hub for every connected device, creating a safe, secure, efficient environment where different products can talk to each other.

· Creating a simple, consistent UI experience, that coordinates and automates tasks based on your lifestyle.

I dreamed up ideas for what a new TV service could and should be with Creative Director Joel Bradley feeding into a team that grew from 3 to well over 300. Many ideas found their way into the final product—big themes like video that follows you (fluid viewing), to building a sophisticated recommendations engine based on voice search, to photographing a billboard advert of Game of Thrones as a way to tell Sky to automatically record the show.

As the design team grew, I led the development of an app architecture that allowed multiple app experiences (such as Sports, News, Photos, Weather, Spotify and Netflix,) to be layered on top of the traditional TV service, creating an aggregated entertainment experience that blends traditional and OTT services.