In addition to the domestic television channel, Sky News also hosts localised versions of the channel: Sky News Australia and Sky News Arabia, and previously operated Sky News Ireland. Sky News is also offered in an international version without the British adverts under the name Sky News International available in Europe, Africa, Asia and the United States. It operates Sky News Radio which provides news for many commercial radio stations in the UK, many of them as the news provider for Independent Radio News (IRN). Sky News also provides content for Yahoo! News, and is available on Apple TV and Roku.
History
On 8 June 1988, Rupert Murdoch announced to the British Academy of Film and Television Arts that he would provide a new television news service. Sky News started broadcasting at 6 pm on 5 February 1989.
Visually Sky News looked very neat, with slick and classy presentation and John O'Loan's original vocation as an architect showing in the studio set. Sky had gone for the same format as the Nine O'Clock News on the BBC which had recently been redesigned to give the impression of activity and immediacy by placing the newsreader against a backdrop of the working newsroom. Sky News, it was universally agreed as staff nodded in vigorous approval, had succeeded rather better at the same thing. The critics were mildly taken aback. Contrary to some of the horror scenarios bandied about by the chattering classes there seemed to be little to grumble about. And as its slogan of 'We're there when you need us,' emphasised, it was always on.
In the early days the channel operated on a £40 million budget (plus £10 million share of overheads), which led Sam Chisholm to propose to Murdoch the station be closed, but Rupert was "pleased with its achievements ... there were overriding reasons of prestige and politics for keeping it ... the final hurdle of the Broadcasting Bill had still to be overcome and the case for the acceptability of Sky would collapse if suddenly there was no news channel." – former deputy Prime Minister Viscount Whitelaw said to the House of Lords in 1990 that Sky News had "a very high reputation ... I admire it, as do many other people, it will certainly waken up both the BBC and ITN and ensure that they compete with what is a very important news service". The channel has never been run for a profit, and has considered using ITN to supplement the service.
By March 1992 Sky turned from loss to profit, when Murdoch would say Sky News, has quietly, if expensively, become the first building block of what we envision will become the premier worldwide electronic news-gathering network anywhere. Ask anyone in Europe, and particularly the BBC and you will be told that Sky News has added a new and better dimension to television journalism.
Sky News was one of the UK's first 24-hour news channels (with CNN International on Astra 1A, while BBC World Service Television launched in 1991 but has never been broadcast in the UK) until November 1997 when BBC News launched a new 24-hour channel, BBC News 24, now known simply as BBC News. In September 1999 the European Commission ruled against a complaint by Sky News which argued that the publicly funded BBC News 24 was unfair and illegal under EU law. The EC ruled that the television licence fee should be considered state aid (within the meaning of Article 87) and that it was justified due to the public service remit of the BBC and that it did not exceed actual costs of the channel. Read More....