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 as 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 additionally been instrumental 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 out from the Football League in 1992.
Sky Sports began as The Sports Channel in March 1990 as Sky Television did not have a privileged sports channel initially. Sports programs were broadcast occasionally from this channel but instead of introducing a sports channel of their very own, Sky Television chose 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 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 remained available on the SES Astra platform.
Sky Sports quickly developed into 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, it was the second channel in the Sky system that was encrypted through the Video Crypt system. Though Sky Sports began 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 had become the most popular sports channel following the purchase of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for a duration of 5 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 revamped during 2007. It was just in time with the football season. Although the main structure of presentation was preserved, the colour displays of the information box, the ticker towards the bottom on the screen and also the breaking news ticker were changed. A brand new studio, new theme tune and new title sequences were also a part of the revamping. However the broadcasting format continued to be at a 4:3 and failed to get up-graded to the Widescreen 16:9 formats.
Till date Sky Sports is related more with football than with any other sports. It’s perhaps due to this reason why this channel does tend to suffer from some loss in viewership during the summers when no football is played.
