Sky Broadband Shield roll out: an update

I wrote back in January about our decision to roll Sky Broadband Shield out to all our customers who hadn’t yet made a choice about whether to activate it. Six months later, we’ve now completed this process so I wanted to give an update.

I’m pleased to say that around 70% of customers we rolled out to have kept Sky Broadband Shield, with the majority of those maintaining parental controls in addition to the malware and phishing protection it provides. And the process was as user-friendly as we promised: we only had 27 incoming calls from customers wanting a helping hand with it.

We’re proud of our product. Free to all customers, Broadband Shield is a brilliantly simple award-winning tool that gives customers the ability to enjoy the internet in a safe environment. With its watershed feature, families can protect their children from unsuitable content yet have the flexibility to pick and choose the categories that are filtered and the time of day this happens. It’s a key part of our broadband service, and it was central to our approach when the government challenged internet service providers to look at how they protected children and families online.

We wanted to give our customers a choice whilst making their online safety a priority. We concluded that the safest and easiest way to do this was to make the default position of Sky Broadband Shield ‘on’ but make it easy for customers to adjust or decline at any time. So that’s exactly what we did.

By asking them to make a choice and explaining that the default position would be ‘on’, we found that customers took a much more active interest in what Sky Broadband Shield offers. The 70% who have kept the protection compares well to our earlier attempts to reach existing customers: less than 5% engaged previously when we emailed to ask them whether they wanted to turn it on.

Last week, we launched our best-ever fibre broadband offer: superfast, super reliable Sky Fibre broadband free for 12 months, giving customers better value and choice than ever before. As more and more people choose Sky Broadband thanks to great service and offers like this, it becomes even more important to ensure the entire family can enjoy the internet safely.

Of course with our diverse base of millions of broadband customers, we knew some wouldn’t want or need Sky Broadband Shield. Customers can activate, adjust or decline it at any time depending on the level of protection they need for their home. And for those who hadn’t made a decision yet, the approach we took meant that the default position was the safest one, so no families were left unprotected unless they chose to be.

We will continue to highlight the benefits of Sky Broadband Shield for our customers, but we know it’s just one way of protecting children online. Our continued support of Internet Matters provides guidance and resources for parents. It’s an amazing resource with advice on a variety of parental concerns including inappropriate content, cyber bullying and radicalisation as well ‘how-to’ guides for setting up parental controls on a range of devices. 

For more about Sky Broadband Shield, click here.