Sky Group

Sky Group Limited is a British media and telecommunications conglomerate owned by Comcast and headquartered in London. It has operations in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy. Sky is Europe's largest media company and pay-TV broadcaster by revenue (as of 2018^[update]), 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.

Since 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News Corporation held 39.14% of Sky Group, and in June 2010, they attempted to buy out the rest of Sky, but the bid was withdrawn in July 2011 following the News International phone hacking scandal that also led to News Corporation splitting into News Corp and 21st Century Fox, the latter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. Following this, Comcast's film studios and US television businesses and other media assets are held by NBCUniversal, which is also under its control and was formed when Vivendi sold 80% of Universal Pictures to the now-defunct General Electric, NBC's then-owner.

Before the acquisition by Comcast, Sky was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It had a market capitalisation of approximately £18.75 billion (€26.76 billion) in 2018.

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". Further cuts in losses were a direct result of 313,000 new customers joining during the first half of 1991. By March 1992, BSkyB posted its first operating profits, of £100,000 per week, with £3.8 million weekly from subscriptions and £1 million from advertising, but continued to be burdened with £1.28 billion of debt. Stockbroker firm James Capel forecast BSkyB would still be indebted in 2000.