Sky Television Multi-Channel Package

eh?



Yes, but look at all the competition that's arrived over that time. 1995 was before digital, before the UKTV network, before ITV2, BBC3, E4, before all the Discovery and MTV variants.

The 20 or so Sky channels aren't as dominant as they once were, the terrestrial spin-offs like ITV2 are much more popular than Sky 1 for example

Though Bravo in name only. It is a very different service these days to the "Time Travel TV" (i.e. classic re-runs) station it was then.

Same can be said about MTV Europe which became localised across Europe and it beggars believe what music programming/videos is actually on MTV One these days.

Can't say I ever watched MTV Europe (didn't have Cable back then), but I've seen MTV UK & Ireland since the very early days and you seriously wouldn't think it's the same channel nowadays. They used to show something called Music vidoes before The Osbournes came and ruined it with the fly on the wall crap.

Same goes VH1 aswell, although they still have plenty of music videos, the amount of variety in programmes they used to show was great, now it's just another channel.

This is referring to BSB on Marcopolo 1 & 2 where BSB owned the satellites (which incredibly only had capacity for ten channels, and the IBA insisted that one be used as back-up which reduced the capacity to five) - Sky did and still do only rent capacity from SES Astra. Sky decided to close Marcopolo in 1992 and sold the satellites to Telenor - there was no sense in running both platforms (I don't think they marketed Marcopolo once the merger went through), Astra had greater capacity, and wasn't regulated.

Galaxy and Now were merged with their Sky counterparts in name only - Sky One was much the same after the merger as it was before as was Sky News (which was a very different type of channel to Now, which was an arts channel). Sky ran Sky Arts at weekends on Sky News' Marcopolo frequencies in order to run out the programming rights BSB had paid for. Sky Sports is probably the biggest legacy of BSB.

At the time of the merger the parties agreed that "Sky" would be the primary brand name for the merged company and while "British Sky Broadcasting" was used on screen (in small lettering under the idents, and with a voiceover '"This is Sky _______, a part of the British Sky Broadcasting network") for the first two or three years after the merger, this ended in September 1993 and since then Sky has been the only trading name with British Sky Broadcasting only really used for official purposes (since British Sky Broadcasting Group plc is the legal company name).

Watching through the ads on the Sky site, am I the only one who hasn't realised until now how amazing Sky's ads are?

From what I saw, it seemed like the ones they seem to take themselves the most seriously in are their ads for football as some sort of almighty cultural experience, and as someone from the outside looking in, I've only found the absurd pedestal they've raised the game to over the years utterly cringeworthy.

Premiere still going strong on the old sky satellite position at 19.2e

No its not the same, that Prem1ere close down in 1989.