BSkyB searches for Pluto

The Pluto UI in Minecraft action

BSkyB has managed to establish itself a fairly enviable reputation as a trend-spotter over recent years and, while this doesn’t always work out in its favour (stereo 3D for instance) it is prepared to invest to bring new technology to the market and onboard.

Its latest investment is $500,000 pushed towards LA-based online video aggregator Pluto.TV. Pluto.TV is an online television platform that aggregates video content from across the web (YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion, Funny or Die and more it says) and programs it into themed and curated TV channels.

It’s an eclectic mix. Out of the 100+ current free channels you’ll find plenty that wouldn’t find any room in a conventional broadcaster’s EPG — Channel 114 is currently dedicated to playing Pharrell Williams’ ‘Happy’ 24 hours a day, while 707 World of Minecraft does exactly what it says on the tin — but that is, you suspect, the whole point. A recent upgrade has included the ability to save programmes to a list of favourites for time-shifting.

While freely available everywhere through a browser, the app and connected TV functionality (so far Fire TV, Chromecast, and Apple TV via Airplay and an iOS device) is currently limited to North America. But it is something that you could easily see folded into a mainstream EPG — especially when Sky rolls out its Project Ethan STB — and it certainly has the potential to crack the insidious and ongoing problems with Connected TV UIs. Much will depend on how good the curation is and whether it can surpass the ‘watch this’ algorithms all the big video players already deploy.

Other investments made by Sky this year include $750k in Californian VR start-up Jaunt and a whopping £5m in US advertising technology firm Sharethrough, while streaming specialist Roku, and digital distributor 1 Mainstream benefitted from its investment largesse in 2013.

Sharethrough is billed as a world leader in native advertising (which, if you haven’t stumbled across it yet, enables publishers to monetise their sites and apps with adverts that are non-interruptive and stylistically similar to the surrounding content) and Sky has been using it on skysports.com. Expect to see much more of that onscreen as Sky’s advertising sales house Sky Media will offer its clients access to Sharethrough as well as utilising it itself.

And expect to see much more of all of this sort of thing too. Earlier this year, Sky opened up a dedicated office in San Francisco - an investment SkunkWorks if you will - to help it continue to forge new partnerships with tech startups. It will be fascinating to see how much of what it invests in is purely speculative and how much leads to actual onscreen innovation. Compared to the BBC R&D budget (the Corporation’s failed DMI project alone cost £98.4m) the amounts are relatively small but, like Pluto, it will all depend on how good the custodians of the conduits are.