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 a satellite pay TV company and along with Sky Sports additionally, it has Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Xtra which are available as a Premium package over 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 ones to support and encourage the Premier League to break out from the Football League in 1992 betting expert.
Sky Sports began as The Sports Channel in March 1990 as Sky Television was lacking a privileged sports channel initially. Sports programs were broadcast occasionally from this channel but rather than introducing a sports channel of their very own, Sky Television chose 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 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 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 that was encrypted through the Video Crypt system. Though Sky Sports started out 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 had become the most favored sports channel following the acquisition of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for the period of five years.
Sky Sports also operates Sky Sports news, the 24 hour sports news channel which was launched in 1998. The look of this news channel was overhauled in the year 2007. This was just in time with the football season. Though the main structure of presentation was preserved, the color displays on the information box, the ticker towards 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 additionally a part of the revamping. However the broadcasting format remained at a 4:3 and failed to get upgraded to the Widescreen 16:9 formats more about the author.
Till date Sky Sports is associated 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.