It’s been interesting to read the many user responses to the Sky Never Miss service, and sad to read the lame response from Sky.
It has always been an under exposed service, that should have been regularly advertised on the Sky platform, as an important part of the Sky ecosystem. However, knowledge of even its existence was mainly limited to person to person recommendation, following chance discovery. Even with that handicap it had reached a point where user involvement in the service, by those that knew of it was high, and greatly appreciated.
All successful businesses know that actually achieving user involvement in a rewarding service is extremely valuable, as one of the most important parts of attaining loyalty in any service, and minimising client losses and churn rates.
IMHO such was the error, that the removal of Sky Never Miss was tantamount to Google removing Google Play, or Apple removing the Apple Store.
The fact is, all the programme information that was used by the Sky Never Miss service was and still remains in the public domain. Now that Sky have abdicated their leading role as the aggregator of such programme information, and backed of from ecosystems, the batten will simply be passed to someone else.
Someone that is able to use the increasingly available AI techniques, to make it a viable automated service. Some early endeavourers have already been made, but we can expect much more sophisticated examples on the horizon, well before it probably becomes just another part of the Google Home ecosystem.
Why did it happen?
Sky seem to be obsessed with push technologies. Those that attempt to tell the viewer what to watch, with best picks etc. Most of us know that with over 12 million Sky viewers, that is largely a futile exercise, as there will be at least 12 million opinions of what are the best picks.
I say obsessed because Sky have tried and tried again, and failed at push technology attempts.
First there was the Sky Magazine. Which in the days of analogue started as being quite useful, especially for selecting films for the month. But then then they started filling the magazine with what we should be watching. It reached a point that many if not most put the magazine straight in bin with the plastic address wrapper still on.
Then there was the time when half the hard disk space of the Sky box was filled up with programmes that you should be watching, not selected by you, but auto re-loaded to make it quicker to see them. Another failure of programmes that few wanted.
Jumping forward to today, in the Sky+ Guide we now have the bottom half of the screen dedicated to best picks, again its the failed push technology.
But this time their failed and futile push technologies have been on the alter of sacrificing Sky Never Miss.
IMHO an extremely bad business decision.
Keep safe everyone.
Epgservices sky never miss
