The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, UK as well as Irelands leading 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 together with Sky Sports it also 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 prominent role in commercializing British sport. This channel has additionally been a key player in making a paradigm change 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 did not have a privileged sports channel initially. Sports programs were transmitted sometimes from this channel but instead of introducing a sports channel of their own, Sky Television made a decision to put money into Eurosport. With the launch of Sky Television in February 1989, Eurosport was marketed as one of its 4 channels.

British Sky Broadcasting and Sky Television declared 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 television. Eurosport terminated its partnership with Sky Television upon the launch of Sky Sports but remained located on the SES Astra platform.

Sky Sports soon 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, this was the second channel in the Sky system which was encrypted through the Video Crypt system. Though Sky Sports began by airing 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, together with the formation of the Premier League, Sky Sports had become the most favored sports channel following the purchase 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 had been launched in 1998. The design of this news channel was overhauled during 2007. This was just in time with the football season. Although the main structure of presentation was maintained, the colour displays of the information box, the ticker at the bottom of 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. 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 because of this reason that this channel does have a tendency to experience some decrease in viewership during the summers when no football is played.