The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, UK and Irelands premier 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 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 inception in 1990, Sky Sports has played an extremely prominent role in commercializing British sport. This channel has additionally been a key player for making a paradigm shift in the organizational structure of sports broadcasting by being the first ones to support and encourage the Premier League to break out from the Football League in 1992.
Sky Sports began as The Sports Channel in March 1990 as Sky Television was lacking a privileged sports channel initially. Sports programs were broadcast sometimes from this channel but rather than launching a sports channel of their very own, Sky Television made a decision to invest in Eurosport. Upon the launch of Sky Television in February 1989, Eurosport was marketed as one of its 4 channels.
British Sky Broadcasting and Sky Television announced a merger in 1990. Initially launched as British Sky Broadcasting, the Sports Channel was rebranded Sky Sports when it was eventually launched in April, 1991 on the SES Astra IB Satellite tv. Eurosport terminated its partnership with Sky Television upon the launch of Sky Sports but remained located on the SES Astra platform.
Sky Sports quickly developed into just about 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 second channel in the Sky system which was encrypted through the Video Crypt system. Though Sky Sports started out by broadcasting sports including golf and rugby, it soon acquired 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 period of five years.
Sky Sports also operates Sky Sports news, the Round-the-clock sports news channel which had been launched in 1998. The design 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 colour displays of the information box, the ticker at the bottom on the screen and the breaking news ticker were changed. A brand new studio, new theme tune and new title sequences were also a portion of the revamping. However the broadcasting format remained at the 4:3 and failed to get upgraded on the Widescreen 16:9 formats.
Till date Sky Sports is associated more with football compared to any other sports. It is perhaps because of this reason why this channel does have a tendency to suffer from some loss in viewership during the summers when no football is played.