John Fellet: On navigating 25 years of pay TV in New Zealand...

Former Sky TV Chief Executive John Fellet is a veteran of pay television; he started his career in his native Arizona, before an extended run at Sky TV in New Zealand which began in 1991. He became the company’s head in 2001, and helped build it into one of the dominant media companies in the country. Fellet left Sky in 2019.

In this 2015 interview marking the company's 25th anniversary in New Zealand, Fellet outlined changes seen in his time with the company. Fellet talks about:

• Spending most of his working life in pay TV
• The challenge of making Sky TV profitable as CEO of the business
• How adding a satellite enabled them to add to their original three channels 
• Developing a strong focus on sports and sporting events
• How the growth of pay TV in the Pacific enabled Sky to add more channels
• Why content buying rules helped lead to the purchase of free-to-air channel Prime TV
• The rationale behind changes to who provides Prime News
• The current state of the TV industry, including sky-high content prices
• How after 25 years, Sky TV feels like one big family

This video was first uploaded on 8 June 2015, and is available under this Creative Commons licence. This licence is limited to use of ScreenTalk interview footage only and does not apply to any video content and photographs from films, television, music videos, web series and commercials used in the interview.

Interview, Camera and Editing - Andrew Whiteside