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 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 over the basic Sky Sports. Since its creation in 1990, Sky Sports has played a very prominent role in commercializing British sport. This channel has additionally 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 did not have an exclusive sports channel in the beginning. Sports programs were transmitted sometimes by this channel but instead of launching a sports channel of their very own, Sky Television made a decision to put money into Eurosport. With the launch of Sky Television in February 1989, Eurosport was marketed as one of its four 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 discontinued 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 one of 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 second channel in the Sky system that was encrypted through the Video Crypt system. Though Sky Sports started out by airing sports such as golf and rugby, it soon obtained the rights to air Italian and German League Football thereby improving its popularity base.

In 1992/93, together with the formation of the Premier League, Sky Sports had become the most favored sports channel following the acquisition of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for a duration of five years.

Sky Sports also operates Sky Sports news, the 24 hour sports news channel which was launched in 1998. The look of this news channel was revamped in the year 2007. It was just in time with the football season. Though the main structure of presentation was preserved, the color displays on the information box, the ticker at 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 portion 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.

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 tend to experience some loss in viewership throughout the summers when no football is played.