Tag Archives: Sky News

Sky News development competition and its royalty free use ‘in perpetuity’ of finalist’s work

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Earlier this month Sky News launched a competition offering £10,000 in prize money for developers to come up with new and novel uses of its RSS feeds.

Text, images and video are all covered in RSS and hoping for a innovative use of its feeds the news provider has put no limit on what developers can potentially come up with.

The competition closes this Friday and those with the best ideas will be asked to attend a ‘Dragons’ Den-style Judgment Day at the Sky News studios on Thursday 20th December.’

According to the terms and conditions of the competition:

“Sky will select approximately ten contributions whose applications show the most potential, from the points of view of design, usability, innovation and originality, to be deployed into a live environment, and could most successfully distribute Sky News content via new methods, web or otherwise.”

Aside from reward of actually developing a useful application for these feeds, Sky News plans to give at least £1,000 to the winner and at least £200 to each finalist.

However, in return Sky News will take quite a bit:

“Sky will keep details of, and retain a licence to use the Contribution of each Finalist, whether or not that Finalist is selected to be the Winner or a Runner-Up. Sky will require each Finalist, and, if a Finalist is under 18, a parent or guardian, to sign a separate agreement confirming Sky’s rights to use the Contribution.

3.2 All Finalists agree that the copyright (if any) and all other rights, title and interest, in and in respect of their Contribution, will be licensed by the Finalist to Sky as follows:
(a) Sky shall have an exclusive royalty free worldwide license in all media in the Finalist’s Contribution for a period of 3 months from the date of the submission of the Contribution by the Finalist;
(b) after that 3 month period, Sky shall have a non-exclusive royalty free worldwide license in perpetuity in all media in the Finalist’s Contribution.
All Finalists must agree that no payment (other than Prizes where awarded) shall be due to them nor shall they make a claim for any further payment against Sky or its licensees or assigns in respect of the license of such rights.”

Nothing particularly new in this, the approach is fairly typical of other commercial/creative competitions, Channel 4 is pretty much setting the same conditions for its own RSS widget competition.

So the position is a news company owned by a billionaire is asking for someone else to design it a cutting edge technological development, for it to use for free, forever.

But Dragon’s Den is all about entrepreneurs striking deals to make long-term money with their ideas, isn’t it?

Has Sky not missed a trick to apply the ethos of the competition to the prize?

If it really wants to be seen as a cutting edge company could Sky News have experimented with a little ad-share from traffic to the site from these new applications (if it’s possible to work this out)?

The same with Channel 4?

Collaborative production is the founding ethos of social media – YouTube and Flickr are nothing without their communities.

Similarly Facebook, for which the technological contributions of its members and partners is paramount. But at the moment, on the whole it’s done for free.

So why not also share about the cash created by these partnerships? After all, if you had a bit of video Sky News wanted, they would pay you for it. Why not for the delivery mechanism too?

Breaking news coverage on Twitter of fire in East London

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London-based twitterers have broken the news of a huge fire in East London.

Tweets describing the spread of a black cloud of smoke in the Stratford area of the city are the first reports of the incident – before any accounts online from the mainstream media.

The first tweet Journalism.co.uk saw on the fire came from the Guardian’s head of blogging Kevin Anderson shortly before 12:30pm. Anderson has also posted pictures to Flickr and at 12:45pm posted an entry on the events to his Guardian blog.

Again according to Twitter The Press Association has now put up pictures of fire.

Sky News are now showing live coverage on the site and a quick search on Google News suggests Sky was the first mainstream media to file on the story at 12:34pm. Sky seem to have been the first news organisation on the scene and are now providing regular updates and a map pinpointing the location of the fire.

A ticker across the top of the BBC News site promises “more soon” reporting a “large plume of smoke” rising from a fire in East London”.

A brief report on Reuters also appeared at 12:39pm.

Tweets from Martin Stabe, new media correspondent with the Press Gazette, say the smoke cloud is now covering PG’s offices based in Underwood Street. (As Martin points out in a comment below, the cloud appeared to be covering the PG’s offices, but was actually further away. Still, he updated his Twitter accordingly and very quickly.)

Was anyone covering it earlier than the Twitter correspondents mentioned here?

UPDATE: reports are that the fire began in a disused bus depot – here’s a view of what the site looked like before it started.

@SOE: (Audio) Sky’s Adam Boulton and Shami Chakrabarti on the need for self-regulation of news on the internet

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Adam Boulton, political editor of Sky News, and Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti both told the Society of Editors conference, in Manchester today, that self-regulation on the internet was a vital part of maintaining trust in major news brands.

Boulton told delegates that he believed the standards online of Sky, the BBC or any other major news provider should be as high as through its more traditional channels, and that this would help maintain audience trust.

Listen to him and Chakrabarti here:

[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/boultonandshami.mp3]

Boulton wasn’t so keen on reader interaction though:

“Although there is a great deal of emphasis on interactivity now I would say that in my own experience not just on my own blog, but elsewhere, the comments by and large are not worth the paper they are printed on, or not printed on.

“They are extremely vicious and unpleasant, where they are useful is that they keep us honest in that they quickly pick up on our mistakes.”

[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/Adamboultonone.mp3]

Increase in video for relaunched Sky homepage

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Sky’s new hompage – unveiled today – features a new video and picture ‘carousel’ displaying footage of news, sport and entertainment news.

The media company hopes that presenting existing video clips in ‘an intergrated way’ will drive traffic across its portfolio of websites, such as Sky Sports and Sky News.

Speaking about the launch, Paul Wright, Sky’s digital media director, said that the strength of its editorial content and its entertainment focus would prove popular with online visitors.

Sky News claims 58 per cent traffic increase from last year

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Sky News has claimed it recorded a 58% increase of traffic in July, from last year’s 3 million monthly unique users to 4.8 million this year, as a result of people looking at its reporting of the UK’s floods.

Sky claimed that features, such as an interactive map, gave key regional information on the flooded areas. Sky News’ web visitors also sent in more than a thousand flood pictures for its online galleries helping – says Sky – to build up a detailed, interactive picture of the unfolding news event.

According to the Murdoch owned site the amount of time users spent on the site increased by 15%. In total there were 16.5 million visits to the site last month, up 85% from 8.9 million visits recorded in July 2006.

On Monday 23 July the site claims to have received 7.5 million page impressions; the highest figures since the 7/7 London Bombings two years ago – still the site’s highest figures with 35 million page impressions (126.6 million for July 2005).

The Sky.com portal is ABCe audited, however, the figures are not broken down to give specific results for its news portal.