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 satellite, to provide a commercial service on three of the five DBS channels on 2 April 1986. One of the conditions imposed on applicants by the IBA was that they use a new, untried transmission standard, D-MAC. This standard was part of the European Community's attempt to promote a high-definition television (HDTV) standard being developed by Philips and other European companies, HD-MAC. The technology was still at the laboratory stage and was incompatible with previous standards: HD-MAC transmissions could not be received by existing television sets which were based on PAL or SECAM standards. The condition to use a high-power