Organization
BSkyB
The broadcaster that won the 1992 Premier League rights vote with a bid made in partnership with the BBC.
Stories on Angle
Background
Selected excerpts from Wikipedia. This is general background, not Angle's reporting, and it may have changed since the stories above were published.
Sky Group Limited, trading as Sky, is a British media and telecommunications conglomerate owned by American company Comcast and headquartered in London. It has operations in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Italy. Sky is Europe's largest media company and pay-TV broadcaster by revenue (as of 2018), with 23 million subscribers and more than 31,000 employees as of 2019. The company is primarily involved in satellite television, producing and broadcasting. The current CEO is Dana Strong.
Formed in 1990 by the equal merger of Sky Television and British Satellite Broadcasting, BSkyB became the UK's largest pay television company. In 2014, after completing the acquisition of Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland, the merged company changed its name to Sky plc.
From its founding, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation held 39.14% of Sky Group, and in June 2010 they attempted to buy out the rest of Sky, but the bid was withdrawn in July 2011 following the News International phone hacking scandal that also led to News Corporation splitting into News Corporation and 21st Century Fox, the latter of which continued to hold News' stake in Sky. In December 2016, 21st Century Fox made a bid to acquire the remaining shares of Sky, pending government approval. After The Walt Disney Company announced that they were to acquire Fox, Comcast initially engaged in a bidding war, but dropped out to acquire Sky instead, outbidding Fox with an offer for £17.28 per share; Fox sold their stake in October 2018, followed by the remaining shareholders a month later. …
History
British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) was formed by the merger of Sky Television and British Satellite Broadcasting on 2 November 1990. Both companies had begun to struggle financially and were suffering financial losses as they competed against each other for viewers. The Guardian later characterised the merger as "effectively a takeover by News Corporation".
The merger was investigated by the Office of Fair Trading and was cleared a month later since many of the represented views were more concerned about contractual arrangements which had nothing to do with competition. The Independent Broadcasting Authority was not consulted about the deal; after approval, the IBA demanded precise details of the merger, and stated they were considering the repercussions of the deal to ultimately determine whether BSB contracts were null and void. On 17 November, the IBA decided to terminate BSB's contract, but not immediately, as it was deemed unfair to 120,000 viewers who had bought BSB devices.
Sam Chisholm was appointed CEO in a bid to reorganise the new company, which continued to make losses of £10 million per week. The defunct BSB's HQ, Marco Polo House, was sold, 39% of the new company's employees were made redundant to leave just under 1000 employees, and many of the new senior BSkyB executive roles were given to Sky personnel. In April, the nine Sky/BSB channels were condensed into five, with EuroSport being dropped soon after the Sky Sports launch. Chisholm also renegotiated the merged company's expensive deals with the Hollywood studios, slashing the minimum guaranteed payments. The defunct Marcopolo I satellite was sold in December 1993 to Sweden's NSAB, and Marcopolo II went to Norway's Telenor in July 1992 after the Independent Television Commission was unable to find new companies to take over the BSB licences and compete with BSkyB. News International received 50%, Pearson PLC 17.5%, Chargeurs 17.5%, Granada 12%, and Reed International 2% of the new shares in the company.
By September 1991, after losses had been reduced to $30M a week, Rupert Murdoch said "there were strong financial marketing and political reason[s] for making the compromise merger instead of letting BSB die. Many of the lessons had been learnt with more than half the running cost of the combined company". …
Management
The first CEO of BSkyB was Sam Chisholm, who was CEO of Sky TV before the merger. Chisholm served in this position until 1997. He was followed by Mark Booth who was credited with leading the company through the introduction of Sky. Tony Ball was appointed in 1999 and completed the company's analogue to digital conversion. He is also credited with returning the company to profit and bringing subscriber numbers to new heights. In 2003, Ball announced his resignation and James Murdoch, son of Rupert Murdoch was announced as his successor. This appointment caused allegations of nepotism from shareholders.
On 7 December 2007, it was announced that Rupert Murdoch would be stepping down as BSkyB's non-executive chairman and would be replaced by his son, James. In turn, James stepped down as CEO of BSkyB, to be replaced by Jeremy Darroch. It was estimated that Darroch would earn around £38.2 million from selling Sky to Comcast. He sold his 775,772 shares in Sky worth £13.4 million and would cash in on previously awarded bonus shares.
In January 2021, it was announced that Darroch would be standing down as CEO, and will become executive chairman of Sky for the remainder of 2021, and will then be an advisor to the company. He was succeeded as CEO by Dana Strong in January 2021.
The current company directors are Comcast personnel: Michael J Cavanagh (Comcast senior VP & CFO), Arthur R Block (legal counsel) and David L Cohen (senior VP & CDO).
Financial performance
Financial results have been as shown in the table.
In February 2019, The Economist magazine claimed that Sky enjoys gross margins of 50%.
From the Wikipedia article Sky Group (revision of ). Wikipedia contributors; selected plain-text excerpts from this revision. Formatting, reference markers and non-prose material removed. Available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0. Identity from Wikidata (CC0).