Categories: Mobile AppsMobility

Sky Sports Seeks To Grow Pub Business With Free Wi-Fi Goal Clips

Sky is to offer pub customers the ability to provide patrons with free Premier League highlights over Wi-Fi in a bid to make the public viewing experience as comfortable as the sofa.

Since the start of the 2016-17 season, Sky Sports customers have been able to watch near-live clips of matches via a mobile application, with all other users able to watch after 10pm. The idea is to offer more value to a Sky subscription and stop customer defecting.

But the issue of customer loss isn’t limited to just consumers, it’s businesses too.

Sky Sports free Wi-Fi goals

Premier League viewing figures for this season are down year-on-year and there is anecdotal evidence to suggest some landlords are considering pulling the plug on Sky subscriptions as the cost of showing live sport soars.

To show every match live, a pub must subscribe to both Sky Sports and BT Sport, and the latter has offered competitive packages to public venues since it launched in 2013.

The hope is that access to near-live highlights will encourage more people to come to pubs, safe in the knowledge they won’t miss a goal or important highlight. All live matches, even those broadcast on BT Sport, will be featured and customers can see all of the goals for 15:00 Saturday kick-offs (which are not televised) from 17:15.

Highlights are viewed through the Sky Sports Football Score Centre mobile app and accessed via Sky’s ‘The Cloud’ public Wi-Fi network. Users connect to a landing page and are given a free link to download the app.

“This is great news for landlords,” declared David Rey, managing director of Sky Business.” At Sky we pride ourselves on helping sports venues create the best possible atmosphere for their customers and this new service is one more way for them to do that. Football fans need look no further than Sky Sports WiFi pubs for all the Premier League action.

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Steve McCaskill

Steve McCaskill is editor of TechWeekEurope and ChannelBiz. He joined as a reporter in 2011 and covers all areas of IT, with a particular interest in telecommunications, mobile and networking, along with sports technology.

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