<font color=cc0000>EXCLUSIVE:</font> Sky News Active changes

Published Monday, Oct 8 2001, 19:10 BST | By Neil Wilkes

Continuing reports from Digital Spy's Alan Jay at the Sky Active press launch

Talking to Jim Rudder (Director of Interactive Programming for Sky Active), he mentioned that their goal is to increase Sky News Active to 8 video screens by the end of the year.

He also talked about plans to make the "press red" buttons a ubiquitous method of accessing the interactive services on all of the Sky channels. Sky's new system to schedule the appearance of this icon went live at the beginning of October - and has already caught out one broadcaster who showed their news highlights of a football match with the button still in view.

For those of you who don't like the little button then using the BACKUP key is the only way to remove it from the screen and he told me that they are not intentionally causing the button to return if you have already used backup to remove it. But if that is not the case, then the scheduling software may be doing something unexpected - so let us know in the Digital Spy Forums.

The new configuration to Sky Active means that pressing the "red" button is going to appear more and more, as it will now be the standard way into all of Sky's interactive services - which are accessible on all of Sky's channels.

It is also going to keep you with the video stream you are watching when you hit it and more and more services are going to be accessible without losing the video. This will extend over time as Sky migrate their content to the WML language which allows the video stream to be maintained in a window.

For those of you commenting on the way that it now requires two buttons to access News Active, that is unlikely to change. On the other hand, there may be a shift to the new video in a window style for content on the same transponder, which may shift some of the news content up a level, leaving more room for the 8 screens of video in the Active service. This should mean less of a jarring change as you switch into Sky News Active.

Sky's goal is to shift as much of its text content as possible into the WML language and onto the new Sky Active style over the next few months - so that will also mean a new version of Sky Digital text.

Report by Alan Jay