The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, United Kingdom and 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 a satellite pay TV company and together 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 an extremely prominent role in commercializing British sport. This channel has also been a key player for 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 in the beginning SpessartNews.Com. Sports programs were transmitted sometimes by this channel but rather than introducing a sports channel of their own, Sky Television made a decision to invest in Eurosport. Upon the launch of Sky Television in February 1989, Eurosport was marketed among its four channels.
British Sky Broadcasting and Sky Television declared a merger in 1990. Initially launched 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 located on the SES Astra platform.
Sky Sports quickly developed into just about 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, it was the 2nd channel in the Sky system that was encrypted via the Video Crypt system. Even though Sky Sports began by broadcasting sports including 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 became the most popular sports channel following a acquisition of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for a duration of 5 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 during 2007. This was just in time with the football season. Though the main structure of presentation was preserved, the color displays of the information box, the ticker at the bottom of the screen and also the breaking news ticker were changed http://sportfanatick.com. A brand new studio, new theme tune and new title sequences were also a portion of the revamping. However the broadcasting format continued to be at the 4:3 and failed to get upgraded to the Widescreen 16:9 formats.
Till date Sky Sports is related 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 decrease in viewership during the summers when no football is played.