The journey from The Sports Channel to Sky Sports, United Kingdom as well as 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 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 inception in 1990, Sky Sports has played an extremely dominant role in commercializing British sport. This channel has additionally been a key player 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 away from the Football League in 1992 football betting.

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 sometimes by this channel but instead of introducing a sports channel of their very 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 declared a merger in the year 1990. Initially unveiled 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 television. Eurosport discontinued its partnership with Sky Television upon the launch of Sky Sports but remained located 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 as a subscription channel. After Sky Movies, it was the 2nd channel in the Sky system that was encrypted through the Video Crypt system. Though Sky Sports began by airing 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 favored sports channel following a purchase of the exclusive broadcasting rights of Premier League Football in England and Ireland for the duration 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. This was just in time with the football season. Although the main structure of presentation was maintained, the color displays of the information box, the ticker at 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 continued to be at a 4:3 and failed to get upgraded to the Widescreen 16:9 formats click reference.

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