The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, United Kingdom and Irelands leading sports channel.
Sky Sports is British Sky Broadcastings premier 24 hour sports news channel in England and Ireland. British Sky Broadcasting is a satellite pay TV company and together with Sky Sports it also has Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Xtra which are available like a Premium package over the basic Sky Sports. Since its inception in 1990, Sky Sports has played a very prominent role in commercializing British sport. This channel has also been instrumental 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 sports betting.
Sky Sports began as The Sports Channel in March 1990 as Sky Television did not have a privileged sports channel initially. Sports programs were broadcast occasionally by this channel but rather than launching a sports channel of their very own, Sky Television chose to put money into Eurosport. With 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 the year 1990. Initially launched 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 quickly developed into one of the most successful channels of the Sky system. It was from September 1992, that Sky began selling Sky Sports like a subscription channel. After Sky Movies, it was the 2nd channel in the Sky system that was encrypted via the Video Crypt system. Though Sky Sports began by airing sports such as golf and rugby, it soon obtained 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 became the most popular sports channel following a purchase of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for the duration of 5 years.
Sky Sports also operates Sky Sports news, the 24 hour sports news channel which was launched in 1998. The look of this news channel was revamped in the year 2007. This was just in time with the football season. Although the main structure of presentation was maintained, the color displays on the information box, the ticker towards the bottom of the screen and also the breaking news ticker were changed. A new studio, new theme tune and new title sequences were also a portion of the revamping. However the broadcasting format remained at a 4:3 and failed to get up-graded to the Widescreen 16:9 formats full report.
Till date Sky Sports is associated more with football compared to every other sports. It’s perhaps because of this reason that this channel does tend to experience some decrease in viewership during the summers when no football is played.