The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, United Kingdom 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 actually a satellite pay TV company and along with Sky Sports it also has Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Xtra which are available like a Premium package over the basic Sky Sports. Since its creation in 1990, Sky Sports has played an extremely prominent role in commercializing British sport. This channel has additionally been instrumental in making a paradigm shift in the organizational structure of sports broadcasting by being the first to support and encourage the Premier League to break away from the Football League in 1992.

Sky Sports began as The Sports Channel in March 1990 as Sky Television did not have an exclusive sports channel initially. Sports programs were transmitted occasionally from this channel but rather than launching a sports channel of their own, Sky Television made a decision to invest in Eurosport. Upon the launch of Sky Television in February 1989, Eurosport was marketed among 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 discontinued its partnership with Sky Television upon the launch of Sky Sports but remained located on the SES Astra platform.

Sky Sports quickly developed into just about 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 2nd channel in the Sky system which was encrypted via the Video Crypt system. Even 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 improving its popularity base.

In 1992/93, together with the formation of the Premier League, Sky Sports had become the most popular sports channel following a acquisition of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for a period of five years.

Sky Sports also manages Sky Sports news, the 24 hour sports news channel which was launched in 1998. The look of this news channel was revamped in the year 2007. It was just in time with the football season. Though the main structure of presentation was maintained, the color displays of the information box, the ticker at the bottom of the screen and 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 remained at a 4:3 and did not get upgraded on the Widescreen 16:9 formats.

Till date Sky Sports is associated more with football compared to every other sports. It’s perhaps due to this reason that this channel does have a tendency to suffer from some decrease in viewership during the summers when no football is played.