The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, UK and Irelands premier sports channel.

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 together with Sky Sports it also has Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Xtra which are available as a Premium package over the basic Sky Sports. Since its inception in 1990, Sky Sports has played a very dominant role in commercializing British sport. This channel has additionally been instrumental 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 did not have a privileged sports channel initially. Sports programs were broadcast sometimes by this channel but instead of introducing a sports channel of their very own, Sky Television made a decision to put money into Eurosport. With the launch of Sky Television in February 1989, Eurosport was marketed among its 4 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 television. Eurosport discontinued 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 just about 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 2nd channel in the Sky system which was encrypted through the Video Crypt system. Even though Sky Sports began by airing 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 had become the most favored sports channel following the acquisition of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for a period of five years.

Sky Sports also operates Sky Sports news, the Round-the-clock sports news channel which was launched in 1998. The design of this news channel was revamped in the year 2007. This was just in time with the football season. Though the main structure of presentation was preserved, the colour displays on the information box, the ticker at the bottom on the screen and also the breaking news ticker were changed. A new studio, new theme tune and new title sequences were also a portion of the revamping. However the broadcasting format remained at a 4:3 and failed to get up-graded on 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 tend to suffer from some decrease in viewership during the summers when no football is played.