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 that exist like a Premium package above the basic Sky Sports. Since its inception in 1990, Sky Sports has played an extremely prominent role in commercializing British sport. This channel has also 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 away from the Football League in 1992 odds betting.
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 broadcast occasionally from this channel but rather than introducing a sports channel of their very 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 announced a merger in the year 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 tv. Eurosport terminated its partnership with Sky Television upon the launch of Sky Sports but continued to be available on the SES Astra platform.
Sky Sports quickly turned out to be one of 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, this was the 2nd channel in the Sky system which was encrypted through the Video Crypt system. Though Sky Sports began 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 popular sports channel following a 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 had been launched in 1998. The look 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 maintained, the color displays on the information box, the ticker towards 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 up-graded to the Widescreen 16:9 formats useful site.
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 tend to suffer from some decrease in viewership throughout the summers when no football is played.
