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 along with Sky Sports additionally, it has Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Xtra that exist as a Premium package over the basic Sky Sports. Since its creation in 1990, Sky Sports has played an extremely 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 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 a privileged sports channel initially. Sports programs were broadcast occasionally from this channel but rather than introducing a sports channel of their own, Sky Television made a decision to invest in Eurosport. With the launch of Sky Television in February 1989, Eurosport was marketed among its four 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 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 turned out to be just about 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 second channel in the Sky system that was encrypted via the Video Crypt system. Though Sky Sports began by broadcasting sports such as 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 became the most popular sports channel following the purchase of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for a duration of five years.
Sky Sports also operates Sky Sports news, the Round-the-clock sports news channel which had been launched in 1998. The look of this news channel was revamped during 2007. This was just in time with the football season. Although the main structure of presentation was preserved, the color displays of the information box, the ticker at the bottom on the screen and the breaking news ticker were changed. A brand new studio, new theme tune and new title sequences were also a part of the revamping. Nevertheless the broadcasting format continued to be at the 4:3 and failed to get upgraded on the Widescreen 16:9 formats.
Till date Sky Sports is related more with football than with every other sports. It is perhaps because of this reason that this channel does tend to experience some loss in viewership during the summers when no football is played.