The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, UK as well as Irelands leading sports channel.
Sky Sports is British Sky Broadcastings premier Round-the-clock sports news channel in England and Ireland. British Sky Broadcasting is actually a satellite pay TV company and along with Sky Sports additionally, it has Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Xtra that exist like a Premium package above the basic Sky Sports. Since its creation in 1990, Sky Sports has played a very prominent role in commercializing British sport. This channel has also been a key player in making a paradigm change in the organizational structure of sports broadcasting by being the first to support and encourage the Premier League to break away from the Football League in 1992.
Sky Sports began as The Sports Channel in March 1990 as Sky Television did not have a privileged sports channel initially SpessartNews.Com. Sports programs were broadcast sometimes by this channel but instead of launching a sports channel of their very own, Sky Television chose to invest in Eurosport. Upon the launch of Sky Television in February 1989, Eurosport was marketed among its 4 channels.
British Sky Broadcasting and Sky Television declared a merger in 1990. Initially unveiled as British Sky Broadcasting, the Sports Channel was relabeled Sky Sports when it was eventually launched in April, 1991 on the SES Astra IB Satellite television. Eurosport discontinued its partnership with Sky Television upon the launch of Sky Sports but remained available on the SES Astra platform.
Sky Sports soon turned out to be just about the most successful channels in the Sky system. It was from September 1992, that Sky began selling Sky Sports as a subscription channel. After Sky Movies, this was the second channel in the Sky system that was encrypted through the Video Crypt system. Even though Sky Sports started out by airing sports including golf and rugby, it soon acquired the rights to air Italian and German League Football thereby improving its popularity base.
In 1992/93, with the formation of the Premier League, Sky Sports had become the most favored sports channel following a acquisition of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for a period of 5 years.
Sky Sports also operates Sky Sports news, the Round-the-clock sports news channel which was launched in 1998. The design of this news channel was revamped in the year 2007. It was just in time with the football season. Though the main structure of presentation was maintained, the color displays of the information box, the ticker at the bottom on the screen and the breaking news ticker were changed Sportfanatick.Com. A new studio, new theme tune and new title sequences were additionally a portion of the revamping. However the broadcasting format continued to be at the 4:3 and failed to get up-graded to the Widescreen 16:9 formats.
Till date Sky Sports is associated more with football compared to any other sports. It’s perhaps due to this reason why this channel does tend to experience some loss in viewership during the summers when no football is played.