It’s 30 years (February 5, 1989) since the launch of the then 4-channel Sky Television package on the Astra 1A satellite at 19 degrees East.
The first four channels were Sky Channel (later Sky One), which had previously operated as a European cable channel, Sky News, a free-to-air Sky Movies and Eurosport.
However, the first channel on the satellite was FilmNet, the Dutch/Scandi movie service that had begun official transmissions on February 1.
Sky News presented its first news bulletin at 6pm with Alastair Yates and Penny Smith followed by a documentary on the service’s launch fronted by Kay Burley, who remains with the station to this day.
As part of its 30th anniversary celebrations, Sky is taking viewers behind the scenes with a dedicated channel, Sky News Raw.
Eurosport had begun as a collaboration with the European Broadcast Union with commentaries in English, Dutch and German – Sky One showed a limited amount of sport including Sunday League cricket and the Zenith Data Systems Cup football competition.
The channel briefly closed in May 1991 before being revived by the French commercial channel TF1. Discovery, which became a miniority shareholder in 2012, took full control in July 2015.
