Sky's NEON launch delayed

Sky's Neon will deliver TV shows such as Fargo, as well as movies.

Sky Television has delayed the launch of its NEON subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service because of "technical glitches".

The Sky internet TV service had been tipped to start in early or mid December, though Sky never announced a date.

Chief executive John Fellet said today the full launch had to be set back and he hoped it would be in late January, though no date has been set yet.

"These sort of technical issues always turn up at launch time - it happened with the early days of MySky. You cannot launch till all the glitches have been cleared," Fellet said.

NEON will run alongside the standard Sky services but will be aimed at non Sky subscribers.

Content will be available on PC and Mac and on selected iPhones and iPad and will also be able to be streamed to televisions via Apple TV airplay or laptops.

The offerings will include early seasons of Game of Thrones, Girls, Fargo and True Blood as well as the New Zealand debuts of the American remake of Scandinavian crime thriller The Bridge and US War of Independence spy drama Turn.

Fellet said he would have liked to have seen Neon running as as far back as June 2014, and delay has enabled the Spark service Lightbox to be up and running.

Skeptics say that Sky is in no rush to launch the $20 a-month service because of the tricky marketing task to ensure it is good enough to beat the competition Quickflix and Lightbox without drawing customers away from the main Sky service, which is much more lucrative.

NEON will not be showing sports.

On Thursday, the internet TV subscription sports channel Coliseum announced it would be entering a 50:50 joint venture with Lightbox to be called Lightbox Sport.

No date has been set for the new arrangement and the merged firm has not resolved how the pricing structure will be set up.

Coliseum is best known for streaming soccer games from the English Premier League soccer and the French Rugby 14 and for golf.

Lightbox Sports is small compared to Sky and without the key sports like rugby union or league held by the pay-TV provider.

Spark's backing will giving the new operation financial firepower to compete more fully for sports rights.

The US SVOD service Netflix is planning to introduce a service in New Zealand in March and the small market has become highly competitive.