(08-12-2022, 10:34 PM)JasonB Wrote: Having spent a couple of weeks in Mexico, Sky One lives on in Mexico however it's scheduling was questionable. On Thanksgiving day they had a Mariah Carey concert on repeat every time we came back to our room. Evenings seem to repeat the Jimmy Fallon late show a couple of times over. Sky Sports still uses the former red and blue branding however as we had the sports bar feeds to our room, we never got to see a full match.
May I explain things up a bit, given I’m Mexican and I have access to Sky Mexico. Although they are using parts of the current Sky Europe brand system, Sky Mexico has never been coherent enough in branding and content and its channels are largely exclusive to the system. Sky One doesn’t offer much programming in its schedule, just airing large blocks of MTV Hits (the European version) and some hours of the Argentinian version of MuchMusic (which has stuck with music, unlike the original Canadian version, although it is much more rock-skewed than in previous years), alongside live satellite simulcasts of NBC’s Today and The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon (which are repeated up to twice daily), some preview content of the Universal+ premium pay TV package (it used to offer Star Premium content until it closed down last year) and some DIRECTV Latin America original series. On weekends and some holidays, they offer endless rebroadcasts of concerts provided by Stingray Qello Concerts, these are branded under the Special Weekends name (Xmas Specials during the holidays).
Sky Sports in Mexico is also a jumbled mess: three multisport channels offering many lower-key events which are endlessly repeated (although they offer some simulcast NHL matches which don’t air on ESPN or Star+, largely those broadcast by Bally Sports); additionally, they have four football channels (one for La Liga, one for Bundesliga, one for women’s football and one for European and South American football, specifically, European Qualifiers, Nations League and Copa América), these can be supplemented by additional channels offering simulcast matches. All coverage is separate from that of parent company Televisa, with Sky having its own anchors, commentators and pundits, as well as its own studio in Mexico City. Additionally, they offer exclusive coverage of the Minor League Baseball Mexican Pacific League, with coverage production handled out of Hermosillo, but with studio shows produced out of the Mexico City studio.
For the World Cup, Sky Sports is broadcasting all 64 matches on linear TV (32 are exclusive to them, although 8 of them are broadcast also on Televisa’s ViX+ SVOD offering). The 32 exclusive matches are being commented by Sky’s own announcers remotely from Mexico City (in previous years, Televisa’s on-site announcers would pull double duty to comment them), the other 32 are directly taken from Televisa’s channels, although they also offer world feed commentary and the clean feed sound (they also do so for all football rights and some multisport rights they have).
Presentation-wise, there is no coherence: promos look like taken out of an After Effects templates, and they don’t have break bumpers to get in and out of ad breaks; to make things worse, commercials are ostensibly louder than the programming itself (there is no CALM Act like in the US). Additionally, there is a lack of common communication between any of the brand assets.