The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, UK and 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 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 additionally been a key player for 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 away from the Football League in 1992 online sports.

Sky Sports began as The Sports Channel in March 1990 as Sky Television did not have an exclusive sports channel in the beginning. Sports programs were broadcast occasionally from this channel but instead of 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 as one of its four channels.

British Sky Broadcasting and Sky Television announced a merger in 1990. Initially launched as British Sky Broadcasting, the Sports Channel was relabeled 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 available on the SES Astra platform.

Sky Sports soon turned out to be one of the most successful channels in the Sky system. It was from September 1992, that Sky began selling Sky Sports as a subscription channel. After Sky Movies, it was the second channel in the Sky system that was encrypted through the Video Crypt system. Even though Sky Sports began by airing sports such as 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 favored sports channel following a purchase of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for a period of 5 years.

Sky Sports also manages Sky Sports news, the Round-the-clock sports news channel which was launched in 1998. The look of this news channel was overhauled in the year 2007. It was just in time with the football season. Though the main structure of presentation was maintained, the colour displays on the information box, the ticker towards 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. However the broadcasting format remained at the 4:3 and failed to get upgraded on the Widescreen 16:9 formats this site.

Till date Sky Sports is related more with football than with every other sports. It is perhaps due to this reason that this channel does have a tendency to experience some decrease in viewership throughout the summers when no football is played.