[Keith]

Sky have announced their new sports streaming service called Sky Sports+. No extra cost for existing Sky Sports customers.

www.skysports.com 

I think worth noting on that article is this bit.

Once live, Sky Sports+ will simply drop into the existing Sky experience, across Sky Glass, Sky Stream, Sky Q, and NOW.

The revamped Sky Sports app will also become the ultimate home of sports streaming on mobile devices with Sky Sports+ streams accessible directly from the app.

I wonder if long term the plan is to replace some of the Sky Sport linear channels with the new Sky Sports+ app. Older Sky box users are already being encouraged to upgrade to Sky Q/Stream, as many SD channel are switched off and others are migrated to DVB-S2.

I imagine linear channels such as Sky Sports Premiership and F1 probably still have their justification, be that for sponsorship/contractual reasons or if often shown in pubs. However, when there isn't a live event on I can't imagine repeats of sporting events and relating programming is particularly revenue generating. Thereby if they can move some of the channels into the streaming app they can be only 'on air' during live events, with some content being available to watch on catchup instead.