Sky UK Limited (formerly British Sky Broadcasting Limited (BSkyB)), trading as Sky, is a British broadcaster and telecommunications company operating as a subsidiary of Sky Group (currently owned by Comcast). It provides television, broadband internet, fixed line and mobile telephone services to consumers and businesses in the United Kingdom. It is headquartered at the Sky Studios in Isleworth.
Sky is a major media company and the largest British broadcaster by revenue. It operates the Sky News news media organisation, Sky Sports, which is the largest sports TV broadcaster in the UK, and the Sky Studios film and TV production company. Sky is also the country's leading provider of pay-TV services (12.7 million customers as of the end of 2019) through its satellite TV platform Sky Q as well as the IPTV-based Sky Glass and Sky Stream products. Its flagship channels include Sky One, Sky Witness, Sky Documentaries, Sky Atlantic, Sky Sports and Sky Cinema. Sky is also one of the "big four" internet service providers.
Formed in 1990 through the merger of Sky Television and British Satellite Broadcasting, BSkyB grew into a major media company by the end of the decade, notably owning all the television broadcasting rights for the Premier League and almost all the domestic rights of Hollywood films. Following BSkyB's acquisition of Sky Italia and a majority interest in Sky Deutschland in 2014, its holding company British Sky Broadcasting Group plc changed its name to Sky plc (now Sky Group Limited). The UK subsidiary's name was changed from British Sky Broadcasting Limited to Sky UK Limited and continued to trade as "Sky".
History
Origins The Sky Television Network, an analogue direct-to-home satellite TV service using Luxembourg-based Astra satellites, launched in the UK on 5 February 1989 by Rupert Murdoch's Sky Television. It consisted of four channels broadcast free-to-air: Sky Channel/Sky One, Sky Movies, Sky News and Eurosport.
The present premium pay-TV service can trace its heritage back to 1990, when Sky Television and British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) encrypted their respective film channels – Sky Movies and The Movie Channel which required viewers to get decoding equipment and a subscription to watch the channels. After the two companies merged to create British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) in November 1990, subscribers could get access to both channels, and two years later, the sports channel Sky Sports also became encrypted.
Premier League football
In the autumn of 1991, talks were held for the broadcast rights for Premier League for five years, from the 1992 season.ITV's monopoly threatened by Premier League. Peter Ball. The Times, Tuesday, 1 October 1991 ITV were the current rights holders and fought hard to retain the new rights. ITV had increased its offer from £18m to £34m per year to keep control of the rights.Premier League unity is tested by an offer of £34m. Peter Ball. The Times, Saturday, 18 April 1992 BSkyB joined forces with the BBCBSkyB and BBC bid offers huge rewards. Peter Ball.The Times, Monday 18 May 1992 to make a counter bid. The BBC was given the highlights of most of the matches, while BSkyB paying £304m for the Premier League rights, would give them a monopoly of all live matches, up to 60 per year from the 1992 season.Premier League kicks off with £304m TV deal. Peter Ball. The Times, Tuesday, 19 May 1992 Murdoch described sport as a "battering ram" for pay television, which provided a strong customer base. A few weeks after the deal, ITV went to the High Court to get an injunction as it believed their bid details had been leaked before the decision was taken. ITV also asked the Office of Fair Trading to investigate since it believed Rupert Murdoch's media empire via its newspapers had influenced the deal.ITV challenges football deal in High Court. Lin Jenkins. The Times, Saturday, 23 May 1992; A few days later neither action took effect, ITV believed BSkyB was telephoned and informed of its £262m bid, and Premier League advised BSkyB to increase its counter bid.ITV fails to halt football deal. Lin Jenkins. The Times, Wednesday, 27 May 1992
BSkyB retained the rights paying £670m 1997–2001 deal, but was challenged by ONdigital'Time to play hardball' by David Teather and Vivek Chaudhary investigate Monday 8 May 2000 for the rights from 2001 to 2004, thus were forced to £1.1 billion which gave them 66 live games a year.
Following a lengthy legal battle with the European Commission, which deemed the exclusivity of the rights to be against the interests of competition and the consumer, BSkyB's monopoly came to an end from the 2007–08 season. In May 2006, the Irish broadcaster Setanta Sports was awarded two of the six Premier League packages that the English FA offered to broadcasters. Sky picked up the remaining four for £1.3bn. In February 2015, Sky bid £4.2bn for a package of 120 premier league games across the three seasons from 2016. This represented an increase of 70% on the previous contract and was said to be £1bn more than the company had expected to pay. The move has been followed by staff cuts, increased subscription prices (including 9% in Sky's family package) and the dropping of the 3D channel.
Sky Multichannels
In September 1993, BSkyB launched Sky Multichannels which was the present digital platform's analogue predecessor. Sky Multichannels was a subscription package that gave access not only to Sky's channels but also to those of third-party broadcasters.
The service started on 1 September 1993. It was based on an idea by then CEO Sam Chisholm and chairman Rupert Murdoch of converting the company's business strategy to an entirely fee-based concept. The new package included four channels that were formerly available free-to-air, broadcasting on Astra's satellites, as well as introducing new channels. The service continued until the closure of BSkyB's analogue service on 27 September 2001, due to the expansion of the Sky Digital platform after its launch three years before. Some of the channels did broadcast either in the clear or soft-encrypted (whereby a Videocrypt decoder was required to decode, without a subscription card) before their addition to the Sky Multichannels package. Within two months of the launch, BSkyB gained 400,000 new subscribers, with the majority taking at least one premium channel as well, which helped BSkyB reach 3.5 million households by mid-1994. Michael Grade criticised the operations in front of the Select Committee on National Heritage, mainly for the lack of original programming on many of the new channels.Triumph of soap over experience. Reevell, Philip;Henry, Georgina. The Guardian; 25 October 1993;
Launch of Sky Digital BSkyB's digital service was officially launched on 1 October 1998 under the name Sky Digital, although small-scale tests were carried out before then. At this time the use of the Sky Digital brand made an important distinction between the new service and Sky's analogue services. Key selling points were the improvement in picture and sound quality, increased number of channels and an interactive service branded Open...., later called Sky Active. BSkyB competed with the ONdigital (later ITV Digital) terrestrial offering and cable services. Within 30 days, over 100,000 digiboxes had been sold, which helped bolster BSkyB's decision to give away free digiboxes and mini dishes from May 1999.
In addition to most channels from the Sky Multichannels package, many of which broadcast additional hours on Sky Digital, Sky Digital launched several new channels that were exclusive to the digital offer.
The switchover from analogue to digital proceeded relatively quickly. In 1998, there were 6 million 'multichannel' TV homes in the UK (i.e. homes that watch television other than the traditional analogue terrestrial), and over half of these homes watched television using BSkyB's analogue service. BSkyB's digital service surpassed the analogue service in terms of subscribers in late 1999.
By June 2000 the service had 3.6 million subscribers, which gave BSkyB 8.988 million subscribers across all platforms. This substantial growth reflected BSkyB's 34% share of viewers in multi-channel homes (up from 13.4% in 1999).
BSkyB's analogue service ended in October 2001, and the digital service would eventually be marketed as just 'Sky'. For some time, BSkyB also ran a free service named Freesat from Sky.
By June 2005, the number of digital subscribers increased to 7.8 million, while it produced 38,375 hours of sport in 2005. Sky's direct-to-home satellite service became available in 10 million homes in 2010; Europe's first pay-TV platform to achieve this milestone. Confirming it had reached its target, the broadcaster said its reach into 36% of households in the UK represented an audience of more than 25 million people. The target was first announced in August 2004, and since then an additional 2.4 million customers had subscribed to Sky's direct-to-home service. Media commentators had debated whether the figure could be reached as the growth in subscriber numbers elsewhere in Europe flattened.
Presence in DTT The digital terrestrial television (DTT) service ONdigital/ITV Digital failed for numerous reasons, including, but not limited to numerous administrative and technical failures, nervous investors after a large downturn in the advertising market, the dot com crash, and Sky's aggressive marketing and domination of premium sporting rights. While Sky had been excluded from being a part of the ONdigital consortium, thereby making them a competitor by default, Sky was able to join ITV Digital's free-to-air replacement, Freeview, in which it holds an equal stake with the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Arqiva. Prior to October 2005, three Sky channels were available on this platform: Sky News, Sky Three, and Sky Sports News. Initially, Sky provided Sky Travel to the service. However, this was replaced by Sky Three on 31 October 2005, which was itself later re-branded as 'Pick TV' in 2011.
On 8 February 2007, Sky announced its intention to replace its three free-to-air digital terrestrial channels with four subscription channels. It was proposed that these channels would offer a range of content from the Sky portfolio including sports (including English Premier League Football), films, entertainment and news. The announcement came a day after Setanta Sports confirmed that it would launch in March as a subscription service on the digital terrestrial platform, and on the same day that NTL's services re-branded as Virgin Media. However, industry sources believed Sky would be forced to shelve plans to withdraw its channels from Freeview and replace them with subscription channels, due to possible lost advertising revenue.
Proposed platform
Sky Picnic was a proposed pay television service which would have sat alongside Freeview and Top Up TV on the digital terrestrial television (DTT) platform in the United Kingdom. The proposal detailed replacing Sky's three free-to-air channels (Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Three) with five pay TV channels: Sky Sports 1, Sky Movies SD1 plus Sky One during the evening with one hour of Sky News content. There would also be two further daytime channels: a factual channel and a children's channel. It was first proposed in 2007 but was subject to a public consultation by Ofcom. Whilst the service was cleared to launch in 2010 it never officially launched, Sky having put it on hold in 2008.
Expansion into broadband and others In November 2005, in partnership with Vodafone, Sky Mobile TV was launched which was the UK's first commercially available mobile TV service. Vodafone live! customers with 3G-enabled handsets would receive the service.