The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, United Kingdom 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 that exist like a Premium package over the basic Sky Sports. Since its creation in 1990, Sky Sports has played an extremely 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 online 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 very own, Sky Television made a decision to put money into Eurosport. Upon the launch of Sky Television in February 1989, Eurosport was marketed among its four channels.
British Sky Broadcasting and Sky Television announced 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 remained available 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 as a subscription channel. After Sky Movies, it was the second channel in the Sky system that was encrypted through the Video Crypt system. Though Sky Sports started out by broadcasting sports such as golf and rugby, it soon obtained 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 became the most favored sports channel following a acquisition of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for a 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 revamped in the year 2007. It was just in time with the football season. Although the main structure of presentation was preserved, the color displays of the information box, the ticker towards the bottom of the screen and the breaking news ticker were changed. A new studio, new theme tune and new title sequences were also a part of the revamping. Nevertheless the broadcasting format remained at a 4:3 and did not get up-graded to the Widescreen 16:9 formats my website.
Till date Sky Sports is associated more with football than with any other sports. It’s perhaps because of this reason that this channel does have a tendency to experience some loss in viewership throughout the summers when no football is played.