Sky Sports is British Sky Broadcastings premier Round-the-clock sports news channel in England and Ireland. British Sky Broadcasting is actually a satellite pay TV company and together with Sky Sports additionally, it has Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Xtra which are available like a Premium package above the basic Sky Sports. Since its inception in 1990, Sky Sports has played a very dominant role in commercializing British sport. This channel has also been instrumental 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 was lacking an exclusive sports channel initially Spessartnews.com. Sports programs were broadcast sometimes from this channel but instead of launching a sports channel of their own, Sky Television chose to invest in Eurosport. With 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 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 continued to be 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, it was the 2nd channel in the Sky system which was encrypted via the Video Crypt system. Even though Sky Sports began 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, with the formation of the Premier League, Sky Sports had become the most popular sports channel following a purchase of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for the duration of 5 years.
Sky Sports also manages Sky Sports news, the 24 hour sports news channel which was launched in 1998. The design of this news channel was overhauled during 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 at the bottom of the screen and also the breaking news ticker were changed www.sportfanatick.com. A new studio, new theme tune and new title sequences were also a portion of the revamping. However the broadcasting format continued to be at a 4:3 and did not get up-graded to the Widescreen 16:9 formats.
Till date Sky Sports is related more with football compared to any other sports. It is perhaps due to this reason why this channel does have a tendency to experience some decrease in viewership during the summers when no football is played.
