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 for making a paradigm change 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 was lacking an exclusive sports channel initially. Sports programs were transmitted occasionally from this channel but instead of launching a sports channel of their very own, Sky Television chose to invest in Eurosport. Upon the launch of Sky Television in February 1989, Eurosport was marketed as one of its 4 channels.
British Sky Broadcasting and Sky Television announced a merger in the year 1990. Initially launched as British Sky Broadcasting, the Sports Channel was rebranded Sky Sports when it was finally 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 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 which was encrypted via the Video Crypt system. 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, together 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 Round-the-clock sports news channel which had been launched in 1998. The design 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 color displays on the information box, the ticker at the bottom of the screen and also the breaking news ticker were changed. A brand new studio, new theme tune and new title sequences were also a portion of the revamping. Nevertheless the broadcasting format continued to be at a 4:3 and did not get upgraded on the Widescreen 16:9 formats.
Till date Sky Sports is related more with football than with every other sports. It’s perhaps because of this reason why this channel does have a tendency to suffer from some loss in viewership throughout the summers when no football is played.
