The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, UK as well as Irelands leading 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 an extremely prominent role in commercializing British sport. This channel has also been instrumental in 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 initially Spessart News. Sports programs were broadcast sometimes from this channel but instead of launching a sports channel of their very own, Sky Television made a decision to invest in Eurosport. Upon 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 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 television. Eurosport discontinued its partnership with Sky Television upon the launch of Sky Sports but continued to be available 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 like a subscription channel. After Sky Movies, this was the second channel in the Sky system that was encrypted via the Video Crypt system. Even though Sky Sports began by airing sports including golf and rugby, it soon acquired 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 favored sports channel following the acquisition of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for the duration of 5 years.

Sky Sports also manages Sky Sports news, the Round-the-clock sports news channel which had been launched in 1998. The design of this news channel was revamped during 2007. This was just in time with the football season. Though the main structure of presentation was preserved, the colour displays of the information box, the ticker at the bottom of the screen and the breaking news ticker were changed sportfanatick.com. A brand new studio, new theme tune and new title sequences were additionally a part of the revamping. However the broadcasting format remained at a 4:3 and did not get up-graded on the Widescreen 16:9 formats.

Till date Sky Sports is associated more with football than with any other sports. It’s perhaps because of this reason why this channel does have a tendency to suffer from some loss in viewership during the summers when no football is played.