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
Television in the Republic of Ireland launched in 1990 and the two merged to form British Sky Broadcasting in 1990. For most of the 1990s however, Sky's DBS customer base in Ireland was dwarfed by the large numbers receiving its channels via cable. Sky Digital, Ireland's first digital television service, launched in October 1998. However, in the absence of any subsidy for the Sky Digibox in Ireland – viewers in the UK could avail of both a Sky subsidy and one from British Interactive Broadcasting – the cost to initially acquire Sky Digital equipment was very expensive (IEP 450) and subscriber numbers did not rise until