The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, UK 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 actually 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 above the basic Sky Sports. Since its inception in 1990, Sky Sports has played a very dominant role in commercializing British sport. This channel has additionally been instrumental for making a paradigm change 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 spread 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 transmitted occasionally by 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 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 finally 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 located on the SES Astra platform.
Sky Sports quickly turned out to be 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 second channel in the Sky system which was encrypted through the Video Crypt system. Though Sky Sports started out by broadcasting sports such as golf and rugby, it soon acquired 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 a acquisition of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for the duration of five years.
Sky Sports also operates Sky Sports news, the 24 hour sports news channel which had been launched in 1998. The look of this news channel was revamped in the year 2007. It 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 the breaking news ticker were changed. A brand new studio, new theme tune and new title sequences were also a portion of the revamping. Nevertheless the broadcasting format remained at the 4:3 and failed to get up-graded on the Widescreen 16:9 formats full report.
Till date Sky Sports is associated more with football than with every other sports. It is perhaps because of this reason why this channel does have a tendency to experience some decrease in viewership throughout the summers when no football is played.