MIP: Sky - coming soon to a phone near you.

Dawn Aireys keynote on Tuesday was interesting. Running through some predictions for TV in 2015 Dawn made it clear that the PVR is at the heart of Sky thinking – albeit a PVR with a capacity for thousands of hours of programming - and that Sky believe that satellite will be the dominant distribution method rather than IPTV or VOD.

Two really interesting snippets though; first she repeated her view that some channels will switch from being ad supported to being subscription based (quoting HBO as a good example). Coming from someone at a company where ad revenue is only around 10% of the total revenues - and where a 1% reduction in churn would deliver higher revenues that ads currently do – that’s interesting. Although I can't really imagine anyone turning away £400m annual ad revenue

Second was Dawns hope to be remembered for alliteration other than the 3Fs* - the 3 Ws. She says Sky will deliver content to their customers in any form they want it - Whatever, Wherever, Whenever.

So we can expect to see Sky on a phone soon. But we wonder whether we’ll see Sky as a major player in mobile – why shouldn't’t they be an MVNO? They have a huge customer base and a strong brand - and given the profits to be made from discount telephony they should be able to make a few dollars too.

One huge advantage of having a Sky mobile brand would be the opportunity to use the mobile as the back channel - just by linking the mobile number with a subscribers set top box - to respond to votes, request information from advertisers etc. Much faster than the red button and much more flexible. Read our thinking on Brands as MVNOs