SKY LIVE

Design, Creative and UI/UX Design Direction

Sky Live was a new product with a hard brief: take it from concept to launch in a matter of weeks and make it feel like a natural part of the Sky experience from day one. By then we’d spent years building the Sky UI and steadily adding components to give viewers more variety and a more intuitive journey. Sky Live had no time for a long strategy phase, so I designed a system for it from scratch. It had to carry everything the product needed to communicate, from video calling to fitness to karaoke, without feeling bolted on.

When there’s no strategy to lean on, you have to know the platform inside out. Having led the content UI for a long time, I knew how far each component could stretch, what our audience responded to and where the shortcuts were. That’s what let us build something complete and consistent at speed.

The product itself was excellent. The karaoke in particular was world class, and people who tried it loved it. But Sky Live was never promoted enough to find its audience, and too few people knew it existed. That taught me something I’ve kept since: great design can’t do the job of launch and marketing. The experience has to be discovered before it can be enjoyed.

Sky Live could do a lot, and people needed help finding it all. So we built an area of short videos showing how to use the camera and its features. The Tips & Tricks rail above and below shows every category we covered.

Social connection was at the heart of the camera. You could watch shows, films and live events “together” with friends and family wherever they were, and you could video chat with them through the TV. The campaign showed this through everyday moments: people laughing and reacting in real time, as though they were sharing a sofa rather than a screen.

The aim was to show that the camera wasn’t an add-on. It changed what the living room could be, bringing entertainment, fitness and social connection together in one place.

Below is the main category rail. It links to each area we designed and to the main set-up journey. After launch we kept rotating the imagery so it stayed fresh and gave people a reason to come back.

Sky Live has since been discontinued. It’s hard not to feel the loss. It worked, the people who used it loved it, and the karaoke especially was as good as anything I’ve seen on a TV.

But it was never promoted enough for most Sky customers to know it existed, so it didn’t get the chance to find its audience. I’m still proud of it. It showed what the TV could be when it brings people together instead of just playing to them, and I think that idea will come back. When it does, I hope it gets the launch it deserves.