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 actually a satellite pay TV company and along with Sky Sports it also has Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Xtra which are available like 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 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 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 Spessart News. Sports programs were broadcast occasionally by this channel but rather than launching a sports channel of their own, Sky Television made a decision to put money into 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 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 tv. Eurosport terminated its partnership with Sky Television upon the launch of Sky Sports but continued to be available 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, this was the second channel in the Sky system which was encrypted through the Video Crypt system. Though Sky Sports began 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 a purchase of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for the duration of five years.
Sky Sports also manages Sky Sports news, the 24 hour 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 preserved, the colour displays on the information box, the ticker at the bottom of the screen and the breaking news ticker were changed www.sportfanatick.com. A brand new studio, new theme tune and new title sequences were additionally a portion of the revamping. Nevertheless the broadcasting format continued to be at the 4:3 and did not get up-graded on the Widescreen 16:9 formats.
Till date Sky Sports is related more with football than with every other sports. It is perhaps due to this reason that this channel does tend to suffer from some loss in viewership throughout the summers when no football is played.