BSkyB and MPP Link to Provide Multi-faceted Web Payments for Sky Player

Sky Player is a service available to Sky Digital customers that enables viewers to download a wide range of movies, entertainment series and highlights from Sky Sports and watch them on their home PC at no extra cost*. Non-Sky customers are also able to download Sky Sports content on a subscription basis. Celebrating its first anniversary, Sky Player on PC continues to evolve in terms of its functionality, usability and content line-up and has hundreds of thousands of registered users.

More than 300 movies are available which includes a mix of Hollywood blockbusters such as Spider-Man 2 and The Day After Tomorrow, and cult-classic Sky Movies titles from Alien: The Director's Cut to Dr Strangelove. The number of titles will increase over time to encompass many more titles from the Sky Movies catalogue.

MPP, following a rigorous tender process, was selected to provide the complete payment and packaging elements. The MPP eWallet is fundamental to the service, providing consumers with easy repeat purchase at the click of a button whilst also providing a pre-pay credits system. There is functionality that enables parents to purchase credit for their children and a recurring payment facility to enable consumers to maintain subscriptions indefinitely. All payments are made via credit or debit card in both Pounds Sterling and Euros. The service will initially be able to process up to 300 transactions per minute and is scaleable for up to 1000 transactions per minute.

Other features provided by MPP is a fully equipped customer support console which enables Sky's customer support representatives to easily manage customer enquiries, such as providing refunds. Also supplied is an advanced Management Console from which Sky administrators can retrieve instant snapshots of account statistics, amount of revenue generated, number of subscribers, as well providing the ability to download reports in database friendly formats for data mining and analysis.

The payment elements are tightly integrated into Sky's content management library, such that pay-per-view and pay-to-keep DRM (digital rights management) capability is seamlessly embedded, as well as subscription status checks which will only provide content to authorised users.

The service offers a complete A-Z movie listing and search by genre function. Users can set their movie preferences and searches can be sorted by director, film name, or actor allowing viewers to create their own movie download library.

Griffin Parry, Director of Broadband and Mobile at BSkyB Networked Media, said: "Using MPP's payment and packaging technology helped us in getting to market with great speed. The range of existing functionality made this possible and was complimented by a platform that could be moulded to our specific requirements with ease. We have been delighted with the support MPP has provided during the implementation phases of the project."

Commenting on Sky's decision to implement MPP's payment platform, Paul Johnson, CEO of MPP Global Solutions, said: "We're obviously delighted to be supporting Sky on such a high profile service and being selected in the face of stiff competition confirms MPP's platform as having the necessary breadth of functionality, flexibility and performance. This is a great application of our technology and we're looking forward to working with Sky for many years to come."


* The level of access to 'free' content on the Sky Player platform relates to the package(s) customers subscribe to through Sky Digital - i.e. movies are available free of charge to those subscribers who have a subscription to Sky Movies.

-- Ends --

For further information, please contact:
Philip Joy at MPP Global Solutions
0870 099 2118

Notes for Editors

About MPP
http://www.mppglobal.com

MPP Global Solutions was established in March 2000 to provide clients with shopping and payment services, which use its e-Wallet, payment, product, micropayment and mobile technology platform. MPP is the first company to launch an integrated shopping basket solution, which enables consumers to purchase physical, digital, subscriptions and mobile products from a common shopping basket and single transaction.

MPP works with over 50 of the biggest names in UK sport, music, media and entertainment including content providers, rights holders, media organisations, publishers, sporting governing bodies and Premiership Football Clubs.

For further information contact MPP Global by email at info@mppglobal.com
or by telephone on +44 (0) 870 099 2118.