Sometimes site redesigns are wonderful.
Sometimes they are a disaster.
Sky has recently redone the Sky Movies site and to say that it is a disaster from a user perspective it putting it mildly.
As a Sky subscriber I go to the Sky Movies site for one reason – to see what is on and when.
I can no longer do that.
The “Movie Planner” was only showing the free to air channels when I tried it a couple of days ago. It’s now returning no results at all.
If you navigate using their “improved” categorisation (and changed channel names) you get loads of totally useless information.
For example, “Man on Fire” is listed as showing tonight, but they’ve left out the all important bit of information – when!
The old site was not without its flaws and quirks, but at least you could get the information you needed!
Michele Neylon :: Pensieri
Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts
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How can they go live with a site that doesn’t work?
I mean they are a HUGE media company, I know you have no choice sometimes but to go live with known issues, but that’s a blocker as far as I’m concerned.
That site is very poor, very poor indeed.
Ed
It doesn’t serve its purpose … So it’s kind of useless really
M
thought it was just virgin media custs ( like me )who were having probs accessing the new sky movies system.
the screen freezes when i enter my pin no and actually have not been able to access ANY sky film for 4 days even though paying for the service. Refund ? yeah right !
Dear Sir,
Since the redesign of your movie site, I now find that I am unable to record films which are PIN protected, which defeats the whole purpose of having a DVD/Video recorder.
We have no young people living in our household for which I assume this type of protection is intended, and we are now suffering and paying for the disappointment of being unable to watch films that we were previously able to record when away from home.
Will you please arrange for this anomaly to be resolved as quickly as possible, and bring this matter to the attention of the Manager responsible for this fiasco, who quite obviously did not take full account of the consequences of introducing this form of automatic PIN requirement.
Mr Richmond
thank you for your comment, however I have no affiliation with Sky
regards
Michele
Hi There,
Well, i’m glad to see that the site is popular enough to warrant such discussion, but I would love to set the record straight on a couple of things here!
Firstly, the Movie Planner.
The Planner is the most popular page of skymovies.com. The problems it encountered last week were due to a feed issue, and had nothing to do with the reskin of the website.
The planner stopped working on the Wednesday, for about 12 hours. We got it up in the afternoon, but it was duplicating the movies. We left this with IT, who stayed in overnight to get the problem fixed.
It was intermittent over the next day, but by C.O.B. on Thursday, was back to full working order. I gather there were issus early Saturday, and I am waiting for IT to debrief me on this as an incident investigation is taking place.
The idea of skymovies.com is simple – support the channels. Point people towards the movies – my team works very, very hard to do that. We review movies at cinema stage, without any inkling of whether or not they will appear on Sky, therefore they are completely objective!
And if you don’t want to read our features and such, the Movie Planner is there to cut to the chase!
And then there are these comments…
“the old site was not without it’s flaws/ very poor/ it doesn’t serve its purpose”
…The new site is the old site! It just has a black background and much more content!!
That said, I am all for implementing changes if the feedback warrants it, so if you would like to register your comments in regards to Sky Movies, or skymovies.com, please do email editor@skymovies.com! The blogger here is not a Sky-related person, and I don’t think they need to be bombarded with Sky-related messages!
Rich Phippen
Editor
http://www.skymovies.com
Rich
Thanks for posting.
It’s nice to see that someone in Sky cares 🙂
Michele