Broadband Content Bits: Sky.com Does More Google; BBC Tweaks Ultra-Local

- BSkyB: The satellite broadcaster has relaunched its online portal to incorporate social networking, more video and integration with Sky Broadband communication tools like email. The latter was developed out of Sky’s partnership with Google, which gives it a sort of white-label version of Gmail and a white-label Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Video to power its Skycast service, and Google is also providing the search facility across the site. Sky says it currently gets about seven million visitors to its portal every month. No word of the investment that’s gone into this upgrade, which was developed with AKQA, but it’s part of a wider-ranging overhaul of its online assets.

BBC: Shrunk by its financial shortfall, the BBC is scrapping plans to create an ultra-local satellite TV service, The Guardian says. It had piloted an online version of the proposed local TV offering allied to local radio newsrooms in the West Midlands from December 2005, and the pilot has ended. But now the focus is on a multimedia broadband alternative, MyLocalNow, which is pending BBC Trust’s public value test and Ofcom’s market impact assessment. Local newspapers, via the Newspaper Society, which had campaigned against the initiative from the pilot’s inception, rejoiced. ITV (LSE: ITV) brought its ITV Local websites out of beta earlier this year.

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