The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, UK as well as 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 along with Sky Sports it also has Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Xtra that exist 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 instrumental in making a paradigm shift 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.

Sky Sports began as The Sports Channel in March 1990 as Sky Television was lacking a privileged sports channel in the beginning. Sports programs were transmitted sometimes from 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 four channels.

British Sky Broadcasting and Sky Television announced a merger in 1990. Initially launched as British Sky Broadcasting, the Sports Channel was relabeled Sky Sports when it was finally launched in April, 1991 on the SES Astra IB Satellite television. Eurosport terminated 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 of 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 which was encrypted through the Video Crypt system. Though Sky Sports started out by airing sports such as 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 had become 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 5 years.

Sky Sports also operates Sky Sports news, the Round-the-clock 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. Though the main structure of presentation was maintained, the colour displays on the information box, the ticker at 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 portion of the revamping. Nevertheless the broadcasting format continued to be at the 4:3 and did not 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 due to this reason why this channel does tend to suffer from some decrease in viewership throughout the summers when no football is played.