Sky Sports is British Sky Broadcastings premier Round-the-clock sports news channel in England and Ireland. British Sky Broadcasting is 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 over the basic Sky Sports. Since its creation in 1990, Sky Sports has played a very dominant role in commercializing British sport. This channel has additionally been instrumental in making a paradigm shift 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.

Sky Sports began as The Sports Channel in March 1990 as Sky Television did not have a privileged sports channel in the beginning. Sports programs were transmitted occasionally by this channel but rather than launching a sports channel of their own, Sky Television chose to put money into Eurosport. With 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 unveiled as British Sky Broadcasting, the Sports Channel was relabeled Sky Sports when it was eventually launched in April, 1991 on the SES Astra IB Satellite television. Eurosport discontinued 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 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 that was encrypted via the Video Crypt system. Even though Sky Sports started out by broadcasting sports such as golf and rugby, it soon obtained the rights to air Italian and German League Football thereby increasing its popularity base.

In 1992/93, together with the formation of the Premier League, Sky Sports became the most popular sports channel following the acquisition of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for a period of five years.

Sky Sports also operates Sky Sports news, the Round-the-clock 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. Although the main structure of presentation was preserved, the colour displays of the information box, the ticker at the bottom of the screen and 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 failed to get up-graded to the Widescreen 16:9 formats.

Till date Sky Sports is related more with football than with any other sports. It’s perhaps due to this reason why this channel does tend to experience some loss in viewership during the summers when no football is played.