The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, UK 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 actually a satellite pay TV company and along with Sky Sports additionally, it has Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Xtra which are available as a Premium package above the basic Sky Sports. Since its creation in 1990, Sky Sports has played a very dominant role in commercializing British sport. This channel has also been a key player for making a paradigm change in the organizational structure of sports broadcasting by being the first to support and encourage the Premier League to break out from the Football League in 1992 live betting.
Sky Sports began as The Sports Channel in March 1990 as Sky Television was lacking an exclusive sports channel in the beginning. Sports programs were broadcast sometimes from this channel but instead of launching a sports channel of their own, Sky Television chose to put money into Eurosport. Upon the launch of Sky Television in February 1989, Eurosport was marketed among its four channels.
British Sky Broadcasting and Sky Television announced a merger in 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 terminated its partnership with Sky Television upon the launch of Sky Sports but continued to be located 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 2nd channel in the Sky system that was encrypted through the Video Crypt system. Even though Sky Sports started out by broadcasting sports including golf and rugby, it soon obtained the rights to air Italian and German League Football thereby increasing its popularity base.
In 1992/93, together with the formation of the Premier League, Sky Sports became the most popular sports channel following the purchase of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for a duration of 5 years.
Sky Sports also operates Sky Sports news, the Round-the-clock sports news channel which had been launched in 1998. The look of this news channel was overhauled during 2007. This was just in time with the football season. Though the main structure of presentation was preserved, the colour displays of 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 part of the revamping. Nevertheless the broadcasting format continued to be at the 4:3 and did not get upgraded on the Widescreen 16:9 formats click this.
Till date Sky Sports is related more with football compared to any other sports. It’s perhaps due to this reason that this channel does have a tendency to suffer from some decrease in viewership during the summers when no football is played.