The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, United Kingdom as well as Irelands premier 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 additionally, it has Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Xtra which are available like a Premium package above the basic Sky Sports. Since its creation in 1990, Sky Sports has played a very dominant role in commercializing British sport. This channel has also been a key player in 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.
Sky Sports began as The Sports Channel in March 1990 as Sky Television did not have an exclusive sports channel initially Spessart News. Sports programs were transmitted occasionally by this channel but instead of introducing a sports channel of their own, Sky Television chose 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 declared a merger in the year 1990. Initially unveiled 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 located on the SES Astra platform.
Sky Sports quickly turned out to be just about the most successful channels of the Sky system. It was from September 1992, that Sky began selling Sky Sports as a subscription channel. After Sky Movies, it was the second channel in the Sky system that was encrypted via the Video Crypt system. Though Sky Sports started out by broadcasting sports including golf and rugby, it soon obtained the rights to air Italian and German League Football thereby improving its popularity base.
In 1992/93, with the formation of the Premier League, Sky Sports became 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 manages Sky Sports news, the 24 hour sports news channel which was launched in 1998. The look of this news channel was overhauled during 2007. This was just in time with the football season. Though the main structure of presentation was maintained, the colour displays on the information box, the ticker at the bottom of the screen and the breaking news ticker were changed sportfanatick.com. A new studio, new theme tune and new title sequences were additionally a part of the revamping. However the broadcasting format continued to be at a 4:3 and failed to get up-graded on the Widescreen 16:9 formats.
Till date Sky Sports is related more with football than with any other sports. It is perhaps because of this reason why this channel does tend to suffer from some loss in viewership during the summers when no football is played.