Pay TV company BSkyB will come under further pressure this week when it unveils its third-quarter results. They are expected to show that the company is losing customers to rivals after withdrawing cut-price deals designed to attract subscribers.City analysts are expected to focus on Sky's so-called churn rate, industry parlance for the number of people abandoning the group, when it reports on Wednesday.
They fear that the rate could be as high as 15 per cent, compared with 11.9 per cent in the previous quarter and 11.4 per cent in the same period in 2006.
We know that were Sky to adopt a strategy of engagement in a variety of ways, churn would drop. Brands have to create value in completely different ways today.
Even Virgin Media looks pretty threadbare to me.
Despite the high churn rate, analysts expect Sky to record a net gain of around 20,000 new customers over the period, around half the number it added in the same quarter last year.
But a high churn rate is damaging because attracting new customers is expensive. Exactamondo!!!!
And there are many ways to engage, Sky has to become more culturally relevant to its viewers, to reduce churn.
Q. So how does Sky better engage its audience, creating a more persistent engagement with the brand?
Its a really good question
If I were them... I'd see if I could find a way to allow groups to form through their IPTV tech - and have people sending comments to each other while watching together - comments appearing on the screen while they share their viewing from differing locations. ie form niche communities around the content. Next step would be to allow some co-created content and allow new forms to group around that. If sky doesn't take the community approach I think they'll soon be running on empty.
In a disaggregated world who needs an aggregator. A community platform - now that's a different matter.
Posted by: David Cushman | May 02, 2007 at 01:00 PM