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
Satellite television in the United States bands (i.e., Ku-band) in addition to C-band. C-band (from the mid-1970s to the late-1990s/early-2000s) was the band the vast majority of cable operators used to receive television channels from. (Ku-band TV satellites were becoming more common around the mid-/late-1980s, very few channels were on them at the time of its launch). KEY: Satellite television in the United States Currently, there are two primary satellite television providers of subscription based service available to United States consumers: DirecTV and Dish Network, which have 21 and 14 million subscribers respectively. Over the past three decades, various U.S. satellite services have come and gone