Britain's first round-the-clock news channel nearly got shut down to save money
Sky News went on air at 6 pm on 5 February 1989 as the UK's first 24-hour news channel. It cost around £40 million a year, and BSkyB's chief executive urged Rupert Murdoch to close it. Murdoch refused, reasoning that a satellite broadcaster without news would struggle to look respectable to Parliament.
Murdoch had announced the plan in a June 1988 speech at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Early critics, braced for something dreadful, were pleasantly surprised by the slick presentation, which copied the BBC's recent trick of placing the newsreader in front of a busy newsroom and arguably pulled it off better. The prestige argument won out: a news channel helped make the case for Sky while broadcasting legislation was still going through, and by March 1992 the parent company had moved from loss to profit.
For eight years it had the field to itself. When the BBC launched its own rolling channel in November 1997, Sky complained to the European Commission that a licence-fee-funded rival was unfair. In 1999 the Commission agreed the licence fee counted as state aid but held that the BBC's public-service mission justified it.
Not every innovation worked. A 2005 move to new studios in Isleworth, with the biggest video wall in Britain and a full-orchestra theme, came with a schedule of fixed evening programmes instead of rolling news. Viewers did not take to it, the BBC channel overtook Sky in the ratings that October, and the evening shows were dropped in 2006. Other experiments stuck: on International Women's Day in 2010 the channel was presented and produced entirely by women, repeated the next two years, and an HD service launched in time for that year's election results.
Ownership became a political question when 21st Century Fox bid for the rest of Sky in 2016, amid worries about the Murdoch family's influence over British news. Regulators demanded protections or a sale of the channel, and in 2018 Comcast won a blind auction for Sky. In 2024 Sky News collected the Royal Television Society's news channel award for a seventh consecutive year.
Source: Sky News
