The early days of Sky Television

Is "Sky Eurosport" just a misunderstanding on the publisher's part?

It was never called 'Sky Eurosport' on air but it was a Sky channel until the Sky-BSB merger.

Sky Sports today is the direct descendent of BSB's sports channel. Sky wanted rid of Eurosport and there was some legal shenanigans between Screensport (a pan-European sports channel run by WH Smiths and ESPN). This closed it for a while but then BSkyBs holding was bought out by French channel TF1 (who own it today) and it merged with Screensport

I can remember Screensport's merger with Eurosport. I remember Screensport lasting until early 1993 before the merger. I can also recall when Eurosport went off air and as I was only 11 I couldn't figure out why it had happened.

By this time ESPN had pulled-out of Screensport along with the rest of the intial US investors, leaving W.H.Smith to run it on their own alongside Lifestyle. Smiths then offloaded it to TF1 who could then merge it with Eurosport.

Rob McCaffery
(Screen Sport presenter 1984-6)

By this time ESPN had pulled-out of Screensport along with the rest of the intial US investors, leaving W.H.Smith to run it on their own alongside Lifestyle. Smiths then offloaded it to TF1 who could then merge it with Eurosport.

Rob McCaffery
(Screen Sport presenter 1984-6)[/quote]

Interesting information. I didn't realise Screensport was around as early as 1964, although I know it existed before Satellite TV's launch in 1989.

Interesting information. I didn't realise Screensport was around as early as 1964, although I know it existed before Satellite TV's launch in 1989.[/quote]

Hey, I'm not THAT old We launched in March 1984 on one of the Intelsats (4 or 6) and were initially carried on Rediffusion Cablevision (and the handful of next generation cable systems that had opened), along with the likes of Music Box, Premiere and Sky Channel. In those early days transmission came from the studios of Media Communications in Knutsford, Cheshire, using in-vision live presentation. "Broadcasting from 25,000 miles via the Intelsat (4 or 6) satellite good evening and welcome to Screen Sport" was pretty close to being the live into to programming, as far as menory allows.

Technically we were a satellite station - even if it took a very large and expensive dish to get us and there were some enthusiast DTH viewers.

In those early days it was a consortium of american TV interests including ESPN that was in control and it was quite a distance away from the later European Sports Network. By the time I left which was after the WH Smith takeover and substantial budget cuts the station had made it into Sweden and Holland but it wasn't the multilingual network of Astra days.

(Just in case of confusion I'm NOT the Rob McCaffery who later worked for Granada, Sky and Talksport - ironically he came to the fore just as I left).

Hey, I'm not THAT old

Sorry! I meant to type 1984.

I knew about the Cable TV service and it makes me wonder how many people had cable in these early years. I never knew of anyone in my area (The Black Country) who had Cable in the mid-late 80s. It is interesting to hear your account of Screensport's early days. I am sure that by the time Screensport launched on Astra, it was available in three languages (I know Eurosport was).

The point about just how many people could watch us was very relevant at the time. We were sports video people, not TV people, although I was always interested in the history of broadcasting, then as now, and I certainly was impressed that sixteen years after listening to Redvers Kyle and Laurie West sign off on behalf of Rediffusion's London TV service that I was now broadcasting on a very different service bearing the fanous star.

It soon became clear to us that the proud lists of towns where the channel could be received by the four channel Rediffusion system were a touch, and probably naturally over-optimistic. It soon turned-out that often we were talking small areas in the towns listed, usually just certain estates. Rediffusion though was a hangover from the past when it was developed to compensate for poor VHF TV signals in parts of the country.

Distribution of towns was very uneven, with particular concentrations in south Wales, which was no surprise given the problems even under the VHF system of getting signals up the valleys, but significant density of networks in east Kent and Cleveland were less explicable.

Rather like LBC in the early days of commercial radio we had to hope for rapid expansion of networks and gainiing of new customers to get the service viable. In that we really depended on the development of the new multichannel networks like Aberdeen, Croydon and Coventry. Franchises were handed-out all over the country in the mid-eighties but frustratingly the actual installation of the cable remained desperately slow, and only picked-up in the next decade.

We were relying on a low-strength signal on a telephone satellite so direct to home was a rich man's toy until Astra came along in 1989. By that time the americans had given up waiting and left Smiths with the 'baby'.

The Astra Screensport was indeed a four language service, branded Sportkanal in Germany, Sportnet in the Netherlands, and TV Sport in France but it really wasn't the station I left just three years before with programming for Sweden and Holland being in English only. I indeed had to cover dutch sport such as ice hockey and indoor rallycross (I kid you not!) in English and hope to at least try to get the pronounciations of the dutch names correct.

It alweays amused me to go to Greenwich in London and watch the massive dishes of the earth station beam our programmes 25,000 miles up to the Clarke belt - and the dish of Greenwich cable yards away across the river take the reflected signal back on its return 25,000 mile journey...

Anyway, my career in broadcasting didn't last very long and was seen by a handful of people but it was great to be a pioneer. Sadly I couldn't afford to hang on until the good days finally came.

Thanks for sharing your memories - this has been really interesting, especially how only a number of areas could receive cable. I personally knew nothing of Cable TV in the late 80s and it was a surprise when I learned a few years ago that channels such as The Children's Channel were available on Cable from 1984 onwards.

I was surprised to find that out too, weird to think the likes of Sky Channel, MTV, Screensport, Lifestyle, TCC, Bravo all pre-dated Sky in general.

Actually the music channel was Music Box, not MTV which I think did launch in Europe on Astra after Music Box had transformed itself into Superchannel I think. Music Box did produce 'shorts' which were carried on some ITV channels, Yorkshire I think being one. I'm not sure if Bravo existed before Astra but the original Bravo was a vintage black & white TV & film channel, nothing at all like the modern channels.

Sky Channel pre-dated the 1984 Redifdusion cablevision launch and had a life before Murdoch acquired it.

I seem to remember that Sky launched on cable networks in Milton Keynes and Swindon first at a time when the only other satellite channels were Russian, from the Ghorizont satellite.

I remember being in Stockholm in about 1985 being faced by my first sighting of multichannel cable, including Screen Sport (as it was then - two words), which I certainly couldn't receive at home in east London, - and finding myself watching a Russian programme of overseas-stationed troops sending messages back home - from Afghanistan. In the end they had to drag me kicking and screaming from my room away from the music TV

The Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter had the contract to supply some swedish sports teletext pages to Screen Sport, so we were warmly welcomed to their offices to view our programme and treating us like royalty when we couldn't have got arrested in Fleet Street

Anyway, enough for now. I hope these ramblings have been of use to some. It's hard now to believe that it ever happened to me.

Yorkshire broadcast "music box" over night during 1986. There clip here of it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEgccctAEkw

I do believe YTV had shares in music box