Dana Strong does not do many interviews. An experience shortly after she became chief executive of Sky in 2021 partly explains why. She was accused in a press report of not living in London, where the media and telecoms company is based, and using a private jet to “commute” to her home in Philadelphia.
She does not deny she made regular trips to the US in 2021. Brian Roberts, chief executive of Sky owner Comcast, had offered use of the company’s jet for her visits. Strong had not yet had a Covid vaccination and he wanted her to be able to visit her mother, who was suffering from late-stage cancer, without exposing her to the virus. Cancer would take her mother’s life that year.
“It was an act of kindness and I will always be appreciative to him for that,” she says of Roberts. The story, though, clearly hurt: after it appeared, she “had to become incredibly guarded. I’m not actually a defensive person . . . I’m very optimistic. But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t scar tissue there.”
Almost four years on, Strong is no longer a new face at the company started by Rupert Murdoch and which ushered in the pay-TV revolution in the UK. Sky is now very much part of the Comcast empire, with the Philadelphia-based cable and media giant paying £30bn for it in 2018, adding to a portfolio that includes the Universal Pictures movie studio and NBC broadcast network. Strong is Sky’s public face and has slowly changed its culture and strategy, moving away from satellite distribution to digital delivery, as the global media industry has been shaken by deep-pocketed streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon.
She joined the company in the middle of the pandemic and what she calls a “once in a generation confluence of events”, when even Sky’s core business of live sport had shut down. “Sky happens to be very unique in that it sits at the epicentre of so many different industries,” Strong says, pointing to the pandemic-related disruption of supply chains and the global chip shortage, which curbed production of the technology in Sky boxes and TV sets. Add in a cost of living crisis and a long-running Hollywood writers’ strike, which froze production of TV series and movies for more than a year, and Sky was being battered on multiple fronts.
One year into her tenure, Comcast took an $8.6bn writedown on its Sky purchase, blaming the “challenging economic environment” in Europe, exacerbated by the pandemic and war. Sky’s annual losses doubled last year, because of increased investment. Strong is more positive now, particularly about Sky’s sports portfolio. Key rights, such as the English Premier League, have been retained to the end of the decade, along with those to the English Football League; tennis tournaments including the US Open, as well golf and rugby league. In its European businesses, Sky faces increased competition for rights but remains the largest holder of German Bundesliga games and has Champions League rights at Sky Italy.
She is also upbeat about the current slate of original Sky series. She brought in former Fremantle chief executive Cécile Frot-Coutaz to run Sky studios and her work is bearing fruit in dramas such as Sweetpea, The Tatooist of Auschwitz and Sky’s new twist on The Day of the Jackal, starring Eddie Redmayne as the assassin. Strong says the series “has blown the roof off”.
Less clear is the future budget for Sky News. Comcast promised to fund it until 2028, part of its regulatory undertakings when it bought the company; Strong says she is committed to the channel. More significantly, Sky’s exclusive hold on programming from HBO, the Warner Bros Discovery-owned network, ends in 2026. Warner has said it will be launching Max, its standalone streaming service in European markets. Strong, who will not comment on negotiations with Warner, has previously said HBO series would continue to air on Sky (in recent years these shows have included winners such as Succession and The White Lotus). Warner, though, may also licence future programming to other services.
In a further complication, Sky in September sued Warner for violating an agreement that gave it the right to co-produce new shows alongside Max, including a new Harry Potter series in 2026.
“I feel good about it,” says Strong, when I ask her about the company’s relationship with Warner. “You could say: ‘she seemed calm and confident’.”
Strong has spent most of the past 25 years outside the US. She was born in Ohio and lived in Chicago and Florida as a child. She studied in Philadelphia, got her first job as a consultant in Boston, then moved to Sydney where she eventually worked for John Malone, the so-called “cable cowboy” who reshaped the US pay-TV landscape. There followed a stint in Dublin, then London, where she was chief operating officer at Virgin Media (also part of the Malone empire). She then worked for Roberts at Comcast back in Philadelphia, before returning to London for the Sky job — where the new Labour government recently changed the tax arrangements for foreign nationals via its abolition of relief for non-domiciled residents.
Strong doesn’t want to talk about her own tax arrangements but says the government has an opportunity “to entice young entrepreneurs into the country through visas, tax breaks for new businesses and a focus on technology, clean tech and AI.
“I think there’s a humbleness to the UK, which doesn’t understand how attractive it is to live in London and the UK generally,” she adds. “There’s such a global embrace of this culture.”
She neatly sidesteps a question about whether the UK could benefit from opening its arms to US executives alarmed at the prospect of the imminent Trump presidency. Instead, she recalls how Ireland, where she moved in January 2011, “worked tirelessly as a government to attract foreign businesses and entrepreneurs” after the 2008 financial crisis. “I think there are models in history where you can jump-start an economy by really encouraging investment.”
Sky has 35,000 employees. Other big UK companies have warned Labour’s recent changes to national insurance contributions paid by employers will eat into their profits. “It’s material,” she says of the impact. “Am I worried? No. We always figure out [our] way through it. But for sure it’s not a small shift.”
Strong’s reticence about talking to the press after her experience in 2021 extends to her appearances on stage at industry events, where she rarely gives much of herself away. It is a shame because she has a sharp sense of humour and an infectious laugh.
She also has loyal lieutenants. Her top team has changed since the Comcast acquisition, with Stephen van Rooyen, chief executive of the company’s UK business, the last head of a business unit to leave, stepping down at the beginning of the year.
Strong is attempting to change the culture of the first two decades of Murdoch’s control, when Sky was run by hard-charging executives such as the late Sam Chisholm and Tony Ball. (Chisholm even had a plaque on his desk that said: “To err is human, to forgive is not my policy.”)
In the Murdoch years, the heads of the company’s business units were similarly big characters, even as the top brass changed: James Murdoch sought to improve Sky’s green credentials, building a windmill so the group could generate its own power; while Jeremy Darroch, Strong’s immediate predecessor, was known for being a thoughtful, considered boss.
“Sky was always a very, very high-performance culture,” Strong says. “You had incredibly big personalities all driving very big but almost independent businesses.” It was, she adds, a “friction-based culture”. Does she disagree with that approach? “I’m [for] a collaborative culture. And both are right. Both work in different eras. What I’ve dialled up is collaboration and partnership”.
These facets are more important given the shifting media landscape, she says. She points to Sky’s role for many households as a gateway to apps such as Netflix and Amazon, as well as serving up free-to-air programming from public service broadcasters such as the BBC and ITV.
She makes a sporting analogy. “I’m a rugby fan and what I love about it is that it’s about the whole team moving forward simultaneously. There’s not a single star of the line-up; everyone is playing a role on the field.”
The team player has some steel in her, though, and I wonder if any of the big personalities that left the company were hindering her plans. “May I remain silent on that?” she says. “I always try to be gracious.”
As dark clouds loom over the media industry, shouldn’t investors be lowering their expectations? “No doubt there has been a shift in the distribution model,” she says. “Through that shift some companies, not all, [but] some companies have been impacted.” Comcast has been less badly affected, she says, and Sky is well positioned to prosper with a diverse business model offering broadband and other digital services alongside its programming. She may have spent most of her adult life outside the US but her positive outlook endures. “My optimism for media hasn’t diminished on any level.”