Virtual Fitness
Sky x Fiit
Fiit has secured a deal with TV giant Sky, to make its virtual workout platform available through the subscription-based Sky Q service. With 20 per cent of Fiit users now accessing the app through Sky, Fit Tech speaks to Fraser Stirling and Daniel Shellard to find out more
Personal fitness services have continued to grow over the past few years and more people want to train at home, track their progress and tailor their workouts to get the best results. We knew there was an opportunity to add more fitness to Sky Q.
Partnering with Fiit to build a bespoke experience for Sky Q customers means we’re able to offer something for everyone: HIIT, yoga or combat training! The trainers and content are really engaging and motivating, which is exactly what people need when exercising from home.
We were already looking at how we could bring fitness experiences to Sky Q, and it’s clear this has become more important than ever to our customers. We’re pleased to have been able to work with Fiit and get their experience onto Sky Q, at a time our customers really need and want it.
We know our customers are big fans of fitness activity already, as they use their Sky Q boxes to stream workout sessions from many of the features on the platform. The launch of Fiit means we can offer a more professional, tailored, immersive workout experience – all on the big screen, in a very integrated and easy way.
Sky Q is at the heart of our customers’ homes, with a huge variety of TV, entertainment, music, games and more; adding fitness to its roll call of features means our customers can do more of what they love in the comfort of their home.
Fiit is constantly innovating to make exercising more fun, rewarding and personalised. It’s a high quality and rich experience that we’re confident our Sky Q customers will love.
The wide variety of fitness classes that Fiit offers makes it a great fit for Sky Q, because it really is providing something for everyone. It’s also compatible with many of the other devices that our customers already own, from smart watches to smartphones, and the TV app will soon be able to synchronise with the data from these devices, allowing it to show a customer’s real time statistics and Fiit points on their TV as they work out.
We want to keep offering our customers more of what they love, from TV to music, to education, games and fitness. Fiit covers so much of the fitness space, but we would like to add more specialist fitness and wellbeing areas to our service – so watch this space.
The Sky Q platform is designed so that we can add apps to it very quickly – we’ve already added Netflix, Spotify, Disney+, iPlayer, ROXi, Playworks and more.
We worked closely with Fiit to create a new bespoke, made-for-TV version of their app. This involved building in things like voice search capability, so that Sky Q customers can say “fitness” into their voice remote to get to our new fitness destination.
Yes, we want Sky Q customers to be able to easily discover Fiit and everything that it has to offer. If customers say “fitness” into their Sky Q voice remote, they’ll get to a new fitness destination featuring content from Fiit, Sky, Spotify and YouTube, and including Sky One’s Fit in 5 and Dance Fit.
There’s currently a ‘Try Fiit today’ option, giving customers access to 24 free Fiit classes, as well a special 30-day free trial period for Sky VIP customers.
We know our customers enjoy fitness classes and working out at home. More importantly we know they value everything being all in one place, and the ease of the Sky Q experience.
We’re always looking to bring our customers more of what they love, so we used insights from our existing fitness content, such as YouTube and Fit in 5, to understand what was most popular with Sky Q customers. These insights enable us to make sure we offer what our customers need, both in terms of experience and the variety of workouts and content.
The new service has been well received by Sky Q customers and we want to keep innovating and developing with Fiit. Over the next year, we’re excited to see a greater integration of the app onto the Sky Q platform and a host of new features including training plans, Fiit club and more.
Sky Q customers have the option to pay to upgrade to the full Fiit service on one of the company’s standard price plans – monthly £20, quarterly £45 and yearly £120.
Existing Fiit members will be able to sign into their account on Sky Q.
Fiit is the UK’s highest-rated digital fitness experience. We combine hardware and software to deliver an immersive, social and gamified fitness experience all led by the UK’s top trainers. We have a wide variety of classes ranging from cardio, strength, yoga and pilates.
Sky was looking at fitness offerings to bring to their Sky Q platform and given we were the highest-rated mobile fitness app with many of our customers already using cables and casting to get us onto the big screen, the partnership made sense from both sides.
The pandemic has allowed people to experience the new wave of connected home workout experiences. Many at-home sceptics have now been converted as they realise that they can get an incredible workout with friends in real time, compete in leader boards, and easily track their progression. At-home is now a legitimate part of people’s fitness toolkit.
Sky is an innovator when it comes to delivering media in the home and the Sky Q platform curates the best in TV applications.
No. Clearly during the pandemic with reduced access to the gyms, more people are using our solution at home but our long term thesis has always been that fitness will follow a similar pattern to retail where customers will adopt a multi-channel approach – working out at home, in the gym and outdoors. We have already begun executing our in-gym vision with our digital studios in partnership with The Gym Group.
Our goal is aligned with our mission – we aim to make exercise a habit for everyone. With Sky’s market-leading platform and reach this allows us to take a big step closer to achieving that.
