The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, UK and Irelands premier sports channel.

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 it also has Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Xtra which are available as 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 also been instrumental for making a paradigm shift 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 odds tips.

Sky Sports began as The Sports Channel in March 1990 as Sky Television was lacking an exclusive sports channel initially. Sports programs were broadcast sometimes from this channel but instead of launching a sports channel of their very own, Sky Television chose to invest in Eurosport. Upon the launch of Sky Television in February 1989, Eurosport was marketed among its four channels.

British Sky Broadcasting and Sky Television declared a merger in the year 1990. Initially unveiled 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 television. Eurosport terminated its partnership with Sky Television upon the launch of Sky Sports but remained 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 as a subscription channel. After Sky Movies, it was the second channel in the Sky system that was encrypted via the Video Crypt system. Even though Sky Sports began by airing sports including golf and rugby, it soon obtained 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 the purchase 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 design 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 color displays of the information box, the ticker at the bottom on the screen and the breaking news ticker were changed. A new studio, new theme tune and new title sequences were also a part of the revamping. Nevertheless the broadcasting format remained at the 4:3 and did not get up-graded on the Widescreen 16:9 formats continue.

Till date Sky Sports is associated more with football than with every other sports. It is perhaps because of this reason that this channel does have a tendency to suffer from some loss in viewership throughout the summers when no football is played.