As a Fourth of July special gift, Sky is releasing the latest season of Armando Iannucci's Veep in full.
Forming part of its Sky Box Sets on-demand service, the fourth season will go online in its entirety - along with the previous three seasons - before it is aired in weekly instalments on the Sky Atlantic channel.
This marks a bit of a departure for Sky, prioritising the binge-watching, on-demand habits we've all become addicted to over the standard linear TV model.
It may simply be a one-off Fourth of July gift or it might indicate the big pay TV player could be testing the water for a shift in how its box-set model works alongside the existing live TV channels it offers subscribers.
Money talks
If Sky, with its enormous weight behind it, starts to follow the Netflix model that could spell bad news for the video streaming guys.
Already recent reports are theorising increased competition between the standard pay TV and streaming companies is going to raise the cost of content all round. That would mean at the highest end of the market even Netflix wouldn't be able to compete with the size of Sky's operation in terms of grabbing the most sought-after content.
"Not even Netflix will have the scale to compete with pay TV leaders such as Sky or Canal+ for the whole range of their content line-ups," say the consultants behind the report, 'How to Ride the OTT Wave.'
"Nevertheless, experts anticipate that the battle between traditional and emerging players will continue to inflate overall content costs."
