25 years of the SKY network in UK

To be fair Murdoch had a satellite channel before all the plans where announced in 1986.

Yes, RDD, the semi-rebrand of tombstone in September 1996 was to herald the launch of Sky 2, which many cable providers of the time didn't take, so it fell rather flat. I recall there was a launch night involving an X-Files fest of new episodes, which I was unable to see on Comcast in the North East.

Sky 2 (v.1) died a death exactly a year later and heralded what I always think of as the 'white era' for some of the entertainment channels and news:

http://i60.tinypic.com/15frzo.jpg

Incidentally, the Sky News theme (which was 'similar' to some TTTV music, has been resurrected now as the Murnaghan theme on Sundays . . . ) I did mention it a couple of years ago when it first re-appeared.

I always thought that these ones might have been geared for one of the aborted launches of Sky Digital (theres an image somewhere on the internet of an early pre-release EPG with Sky Movies Screen 1-8 and Sky Movies Gold 1 and 2 in the movies section).

Neither of those videos have all the idents. Sky Sports 2 is missing from the first one, Sky Sports 3 and Sky Scottish from the second, and Sky One Undun from both. The second Undun ident was very shortlived, being used only from September 1 to October 18 1996, with the block getting the chop when most of it's programmes moved to Fox Kids upon it's launch. But it's not the most shortlived Sky ident ever. That would be the original Sky Sports 3 ident, due to the channel launching on August 18 1996! The ident was replaced after only two weeks!

Sky Sports 2 is in the first vid.

Operation of a channel and a platform are quite different things.

To be fair IBA should have went down this route to built up customers demand BEFORE slashing out on expensive demands

Or they could have just been reasonable in their demands in the first place. There was nothing inherently wrong with the existing MAC standards (and in the end, even PAL did a fair job). Stuff like insisting that each satellite had a backup didn't help.


In the end, all the research was basically a waste of time as the DVB quickly emerged and superseded it all less than a decade later.

When we signed up for Cable in our area, Nynex at the time must have been one of the only the few providers that carried Sky2, yet when it ceased it took them about six months to get National Geographic on instead.

The egg look was introduced on Sky promos about late 1996, early 1997, however they didn't end up on the idents until Saturday 1st November 1997, that time was probably Sky's last big overhaul before they launched Sky Digital in 1998. Sky Sports 2 went from a free channel (if you took SS1) to an extra premium channel, it went from 4 days a week broadcasting to 7, many channels were shifted around, some got their hours extended, others closed, and most notably Sky Movies and The Movie Channel were axed in favour of Screen 1 and Screen 2, which I didn't mind at the time, it looked good, but when they changed it to Sky Premier in 1998 that only enhanced the image.

One of the many rumours why Sky decorporated itself in 1998 was because there was a strong chance BSkyB could have been split into two companies, one for the channels, the other platform, which meant that the channels had an uppercase 'SKY' on their logos, which had no resemblence to the corporate image of Sky at that time, which was lower case. Obviously it never happened.

I think Sky looks decent now in terms of image, but for ident quality, it certainly peaked in 1998.

There actually existed a version of the Sky digital logo with the egg look, and as you say it was on the pre-release version of the EPG, as well as early remote controls and even the first issue viewing cards. Quite clearly the decision to rebrand to the swoosh logo was taken at a very late stage - unsurprising seeing as the egg look lasted less than a year. It may have been that in the digital transition period they wanted a logo that gave "digital" equal prominence with "Sky" which the egg logo didn't.

Sky's branding was rather confusing after that as post-1998 every channel had its own logo and look and the "SKY" used in them didn't match the Sky corporate logo. The two wouldn't become the same again until relatively recently.