Sky's Managing Director of Content Gary Davey will be in conversation with Managing Director of Sugar Films, Pat Younge.
For the last year Gary Davey has been responsible for Sky’s entertainment, movies and news channels in the UK – as well as overseeing the entire entertainment offering of Sky Deutschland.
Gary’s long career in pay TV has seen him occupy senior roles in Italy, Hong Kong and the USA – as well as a previous stint at Sky.
It’s been an unusually domestic and turbulent month. Covid-19 wiped out the idea of piggy-backing on my wife’s work trip to Tokyo, the family holiday in Greece and travelling to Edinburgh for the TV festival.
But it’s not been quiet, as the reverberations of the death in May of George Floyd, under the knee of an American cop, are still being felt in August.
Short-form online content is booming. YouTube depends on it. Channel 4 and BBC Three are showcasing short films unsuited to conventional linear-TV schedules. Brands, wary of ad blocking, are in the market for short-form content, too.
These were some of the conclusions of a wide-ranging and packed RTS Futures panel discussion, “Size matters: A provocative look at short-form content”. The session was chaired with erudition and flair by Pat Younge, co-founder and Managing Director of Sugar Films.
Watch the full video from In Conversation with... Gary Davey. The early evening event was hosted by the Managing Director of Sugar Films, Pat Younge.
Gary Davey is one of pay-TV’s most experienced executives. He was part of the team that launched Sky TV in the late 1980s. Now, after holding senior positions in Sky Italia, Sky Deutschland and Star TV (when he was based in Hong Kong), he is back in the UK. He was appointed Sky’s Managing Director for Content in January 2015.
Start the week reviewing Sugar Films’ cash flow and trying to get my head around a new accounting software system. Any of my former CFOs will know that I wasn’t put on planet Earth to do this, but I plough on gamely.
One of the things I discover is that the BBC pitch system doesn’t tell you when a commissioner has been made redundant. So an idea that I thought must be getting lots of consideration has actually been languishing, lonely and unread, in a dead Dropbox on the BBC server. Note to self – don’t take it personally.
Watch highlights from the Royal Television Society's Early Evening Event with Sky's Managing Director of Content Gary Davey which was chaired by Sugar Films' Managing Director Pat Younge.
During the event Davey said that TV channels are here to stay when Younge asked about whether Sky are worried about the competition from Netflix and Amazon.
Speaking at an RTS Early Evening Event Davey said that despite the proliferation of ways of watching content linear channels would continue to survive.
“Channels will always be around. | cannot see a future where they don’t exist,” said Davey, a pay TV veteran who was part of the team that helped establish the pioneering satellite broadcaster in the early 1990s.
“There is a revolution going on but it’s happening a lot slower than people think…
