Football was the battering ram that built Sky into Britain's pay-TV giant
In 1992 BSkyB paid £304 million for exclusive live Premier League football, outbidding ITV, which had raised its offer to £34 million a year. Rupert Murdoch called sport a battering ram for pay television. By 2015 Sky was bidding £4.2 billion for three seasons, and subscription prices rose to cover it.
Sky began on 5 February 1989 as four free channels beamed from Luxembourg's Astra satellites. Its rival, British Satellite Broadcasting, was fighting for the same small audience, and in November 1990 the two merged into BSkyB. Both had already started scrambling their film channels, so viewers needed a decoder and a subscription; sport followed in 1992. The following year the company turned almost entirely to fees with a package bundling its own channels and third-party ones.
The football deal shaped everything. The BBC took highlights while BSkyB got up to 60 live matches a season, a monopoly that lasted until the European Commission decided exclusivity hurt competition, ending it from 2007. Each renewal cost more: £670 million for 1997 to 2001, then £1.1 billion when the terrestrial challenger ONdigital pushed up the price. That rival later collapsed, partly under the weight of Sky's grip on premium sport, and Sky became an equal partner in its free replacement, Freeview.
Digital television arrived on 1 October 1998. More than 100,000 set-top boxes sold within a month, which persuaded Sky to give boxes and mini dishes away from May 1999, and by late that year digital customers outnumbered analogue ones. Analogue broadcasts ended in 2001. In 2010 Sky's satellite service reached 10 million homes, the first pay-TV platform in Europe to do so.
To fend off telecoms firms selling bundles, Sky bought the broadband provider Easynet in 2005 for £211 million and launched the UK's first commercial mobile TV service with Vodafone. It later poured money into original programmes, launching Sky Atlantic with HBO content in 2011. Now owned by Comcast, it is Britain's biggest broadcaster by revenue, with 12.7 million pay-TV customers at the end of 2019.
Source: Sky UK
