British Sky Broadcasting
British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB - formerly two companies, Sky Television and British Satellite Broadcasting, which merged) is a company that operates the most popular subscription television service in the UK and Eire. It also produces TV content, and TV channels.Sky (UK) is a direct broadcast satellite (DBS) service operating in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It began as Sky Channel, a FTA service originating in the Netherlands, targeting English speakers throughout Europe. It did not have a UK broadcasting licence, as so was legally similar in that territory to the popular pirate radio stations of twenty years before.
It was purchased by News Corporation, and relaunched (as Sky Television) in February 1989. It was one of the first DBS services in the world to become operational. This was a four channel service on the Astra satellite at 19.2° east. (News Corporation owns about 78% of New Zealand's SKY Network Television Limited.)
The Astra satellite was owned by a Luxembourg-based consortium and controlled from there, but Sky's broadcasts originated in the UK and were subject to British regulation, originally by the Cable Authority and later by the Independent Television Commission.
The failure of a rival company British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) in November 1990 led to a merger, which was effectivly a takeover as few staff, channels or programs moved to the new service. The new company was called British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB). The merger may have saved Sky financially.
Despite its popularity, Sky had very few major advertisers to begin with, and was also beginning to suffer from embarrassing breakdowns. Acquiring BSB's healthier advertising contracts and equipment solved these problems at a stroke.
With the launch of more Astra satellites from 1991 onward BSkyB was able to begin expanding its services (the Astra satellites were all orbitally co-located so that they could be received using the same dish), and the launch of the first Astra 2 series satellite at a new orbital position, 28.2° east, in 1997 (followed by more Astra satellites as well as Eutelsat's Eurobird at 28.5° east), enabled the company to launch a new all-digital service, Sky Digital, with the potential to carry hundreds of television and radio channels.
Once again Sky faced competition, this time from the ONdigital digital terrestrial television service (later renamed ITV Digital), and once more saw off its rivals partly thanks to aggressive marketing and partly because of its rivals' numerous technical and administrative failures. One of these problems was that its method of encryption was easily breakable. The supplier of the algorithm, Vivendi Universal, alleged in court that a News Corporation subsidiary was responsible for releasing the algorithm's secrets. News made an out-of-court settlement.
However, Sky was more receptive to ITV Digital's replacement, Freeview. It has three channels on this FTA platform.
In 2002 it planned to launch Sky News America, however this has not happened thus far.
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which was originally the sole owner of BSkyB, currently has a 38% stake in the company.
Sky utilises the VideoCrypt pay-TV scrambling system.
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