Sky Television plc
| Defunct | |
| Industry | Media |
| Fate | (Sky Television plc) Massive losses and merged with BSB to become BSkyB |
| Founded | November 1980 |
| Defunct | November 1990 |
| Headquarters | London, England, UK |
|
Key people
|
Brian Haynes Rupert Murdoch Andrew Neil |
| Products | Pay TV services Programming |
| Revenue | Unknown |
| Unknown | |
| Unknown | |
| Parent | News Corporation |
Sky Television plc was a public limited company which operated a nine-channel satellite television service, launched by Rupert Murdoch's News International on 5 February 1989. Sky Television and its rival British Satellite Broadcasting suffered large financial losses and merged on 2 November 1990 to form British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB). Programming merger took effect on 1 December 1990.
Sky Television plc was originally Satellite Television Ltd. (SATV), a consortium set up by Brian Haynes in November 1980. Haynes was a former journalist employed at Thames Television. In 1979 he produced a documentary for the TV Eye strand which looked at Ted Turner and his satellite broadcasting operations in the USA from 1970 through the Turner Broadcasting System (now a media conglomerate and subsidiary of Time Warner). He soon realised the potential of using satellites to provide a new kind of television broadcasting. Haynes first advised Thames Television, the Independent Broadcasting Authority and an industry group before setting up SATV.
In October 1981, SATV began test transmissions on the Orbital Test Satellite after the European Space Agency allowed the company to test the satellite for the use of commercial television, with an hour of light entertainment in English each night. While at first the island of Malta was its official target, it had a wide, pan-European footprint. However, the low-powered satellite forced it to broadcast to cable systems rather than directly to individual satellite dishes, which proved to be a losing proposition.
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