Sky Sports News To Become Pay Only

BSkyB is set to pull Sky Sports News from Freeview in a bid to drive subscription revenues, ending 8 years of free-to-air broadcasting of the channel.

BSkyB launched Sky Sports News on Freeview in 2002 alongside Sky News and Sky Travel and is to replace the channel with a one-hour-timeshifted Sky 3 +1 service later this year.

Despite the Sky Sports News service benefiting from advert revenues on Freeview – it is thought that BSkyB has decided to drive customers to its pay-to-view service as competition from Virgin and other digital services increases.

As part of the move, BSkyB is to boost editorial investment in Sky Sports News as it prepares to launch a high definition service.

When the service becomes pay-only it will be available on Sky, Virgin Media and Talk Talk TV.