Sky (New Zealand)

Sky Network Television Limited, more commonly known as Sky, is a New Zealand broadcasting company that provides pay television services via satellite, media streaming services and broadband internet services. It is also a wholesale channel provider to New Zealand IPTV provider Vodafone. As at 30 June 2022, Sky had 965,909 residential television subscribers consisting of 529,521 satellite subscribers and 436,388 streaming subscribers. Additionally, Sky had 6,877 commercial subscribers as well as 17,975 broadband customers. Despite the similarity of name, branding and services, such as ''Sky Go'' and ''MySky'' shared with its European equivalent, Sky, there is no connection between the companies.

History

The company was founded by Craig Heatley, Terry Jarvis, Trevor Farmer and Alan Gibbs in 1987 as Sky Media Limited. It was formed to investigate beaming sports programming into nightclubs and pubs using high performance 4-metre satellite dishes by Jarvis and an engineering associate Brian Green, but was redirected into pay television following successful bidding in early 1990 for four groups of UHF frequencies in the Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga regions. Initially operating only in the Auckland region, Sky contracted Broadcast Communications (now Kordia) to provide the broadcast service and transmission from its Panorama Road studios, formerly owned by defunct broadcaster Northern Television. The first Sky subscriber was former Speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives Jonathan Hunt, according to Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand.

The concept of a pay television service was new to New Zealand and Sky had early problems. These included viewer acceptance of subscriber television. It faced difficulty in educating retailers and customers on the use of the original decoders. However, this problem was eased with the introduction of easier-to-use decoders that allowed greater viewer flexibility.

UHF service

Sky originally launched on 18 May 1990 as an analogue UHF service. Subscribers required a VideoCrypt decoder and a UHF aerial, both of which were supplied by when joining Sky. The signal was sent with the picture scrambled using VideoCrypt technology; the decoder was used to unscramble the picture. Sky Movies was the only channel broadcast in NICAM stereo; Sky Sport and Sky News were broadcast in mono. The original decoder didn't actually support stereo sound; if a subscriber wanted to watch Sky Movies in stereo, the subscriber had to feed the audio from another source such as a NICAM stereo capable VCR.

Free-to-air broadcasts were shown in the early morning hours on Sky News and between 5 pm and 6 pm on Sky Sport until mid-1991; however, those without a Sky subscription could view the broadcasts without a UHF decoder by tuning their TV to the Sky News or Sky Sport UHF channel, as the signals were not scrambled during those times.

The original channel lineup consisted of three channels, Sky Movies (later renamed to HBO before reverting to its original name), Sky Sport and Sky News. Sky rapidly won long term rights from US sports network ESPN (which became a 1% shareholder) as well as CNN and HBO providing it with a supply of sports, news and movies for the three channels. Sky News screened a mixture of CNN International and BBC
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