The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, United Kingdom and Irelands premier sports channel.

Sky Sports is British Sky Broadcastings premier Round-the-clock 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 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 for making a paradigm shift 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 was lacking a privileged sports channel in the beginning. Sports programs were transmitted occasionally from this channel but rather than introducing a sports channel of their very own, Sky Television chose to put money into Eurosport. Upon the launch of Sky Television in February 1989, Eurosport was marketed among its 4 channels.

British Sky Broadcasting and Sky Television announced a merger in 1990. Initially unveiled as British Sky Broadcasting, the Sports Channel was rebranded Sky Sports when it was finally 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 soon 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, this was the 2nd channel in the Sky system which was encrypted through the Video Crypt system. Though Sky Sports started out by airing 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, with the formation of the Premier League, Sky Sports had become the most popular sports channel following the acquisition 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 was launched in 1998. The design of this news channel was overhauled 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 on the screen and also the breaking news ticker were changed. 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 a 4:3 and did not get up-graded to the Widescreen 16:9 formats.

Till date Sky Sports is associated more with football than with any other sports. It is perhaps due to this reason why this channel does tend to experience some loss in viewership during the summers when no football is played.