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From its unlikely beginnings in a 'car-park on the way to Heathrow', Sky Television has changed the face of broadcasting. Ian Darby charts the secrets of its success
Sky Television began broadcasting at 6pm on 5 February 1989. Its four channels signalled the birth of multichannel television in the UK and eventually led to an explosion in digital television that shattered the terrestrial status quo.
The broadcaster was backed by its majority shareholder, Rupert Murdoch's News International, which had acquired a little-known satellite channel in 1983 for ?1 and rebadged it as Sky Channel (broadcasting in Ireland from 1987). It soon added Sky News, Sky Movies and Eurosport and was up and running. The first ad to appear on Sky was a spot for the Amstrad Fidelity camcorder. A small irony given that Sky now owns Amstrad.
Andrew Neil, the editor of The Sunday Times who was brought in by Murdoch to launch Sky as executive chairman, says: "It took Britain 60 years to get to four channels, within six months we'd doubled that figure."
Sky's early months were a hard grind as it battled to bring in subscribers and fought media portrayals of its service as "council house TV'.There was also the looming spectre of competition in the shape of British Satellite Broadcasting: a well-funded, official, Government-supported operation gearing-up for launch. "Almost everybody said that we'd fail,"Neil recalls.
Sky's attitude from day one was to challenge TV establishment norms. It secured premises that, according to observers, resembled a "car-park on the way to Heathrow" and bought in production and transmission technology that wasn't standard.
This lack of convention also extended toitsadsalesoperation,laterknown as Sky Media. Neil says that he looked around the UK market for an ad sales chief without an obvious candidate emerging.He says:"Anybody with any experience of the market was at ITV, which was essentially a money taker people there were used to their fourhour expense lunches and that didn't fit with our culture at all."
Instead, Sky turned to Pat Mastandrea, the vice-president of sales at Fox Network in the US, as its first managing director, with responsibility for sales. Mastandrea, now the chief executive of the US headhunterThe Cheyenne Group, faced a struggle in getting advertisers to commit to Sky.