Sky Television plc Sky Television plc 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
British Satellite Broadcasting launch of its own satellites costing an estimated £200 million. When BSB finally went on air in March 1990, 13 months after Sky, the company's technical problems were resolved and its programming was critically acclaimed. However its D-MAC receivers were more expensive than Sky's PAL equivalents and incompatible with them. Many potential customers compared the competition between the rival satellite companies to the format war between VHS and Betamax home video recorders, and chose to wait and see which company would win outright, in order to avoid buying potentially obsolete equipment. Both BSB and Sky companies had begun to struggle