Sky Sports News Radio

» see skysports.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

British sports radio in 2010 meant one commercial national station and whatever the BBC did on 5 Live. Sky owned the rights and the newsroom that covered them, and had no radio license worth anything, so it built a station that did not need one. Sky Sports News Radio launched in June 2010 as an online and digital-television service running 24 hours a day, out of the Sky Sports Digital Media Centre in Leeds, in the same building as the television channel and the website.

The economics were unusually good on paper. The reporters were already filing and the pundits were already booked, and Sky News Radio next door ran a national audio newsroom that the station could pull from. A radio station on top of that was mostly a studio and a playout chain. It simulcast Gillette Soccer Saturday with Jeff Stelling and took live drops from Sky's on-air names, and otherwise ran a rolling wheel of results and transfer lines.

What it did not have was a place on the dial. Everything went out over the internet and through the television electronic program guides, with Radioplayer added in March 2014. British sports radio at the time was overwhelmingly a car radio habit, and a car in 2010 had FM and, if it was recent enough, DAB.

~ the case file ~

~ the leeds room ~

Leeds is worth noting because it was not London. Sky put its sports digital operation in Yorkshire, and the radio station inherited that address, which meant a national sports service produced a long way from the press boxes and the agents' phones. It worked because the television newsroom was in the same room and everything arrived there first anyway.

A station with no transmitter and no frequency is, from anywhere outside the country, just a URL, which ought to have made this the most portable thing Sky owned. In practice it lived inside a set of apps and program guides that were sold in Britain and Ireland. I have never heard a second of it.

~ the slot that never came ~

In March 2014 the station changed shape. It went from a tight news wheel to presenter-led programming, under a new tagline: give us 15 minutes, we'll give you the world of sport. It launched on Radioplayer on 21 March. The stated reason for the rebuild was a possible DAB launch, which is the thing that would have turned a stream into a station. The multiplex space never came free at a price Sky wanted to pay.

Six months after the relaunch the station had a presenter-led schedule and still no transmitter.

~ the sunday evening ~

The end was posted to Facebook on the last Sunday of September 2014. Sky Sports News Radio is no longer broadcasting as a rolling news programme, it said, and pointed listeners at on-demand audio on skysports.com instead. No press release and no final show. RadioToday picked it up on the Monday and reported that eighteen radio jobs in Leeds had gone.

Sky's line was that a stand-alone sports radio service was no longer viable. Four years earlier the same company had decided it was, and nothing about the cost side had changed much. What changed was that the audio was worth more chopped into clips on the website than it was as a continuous signal nobody could pick up in a car.

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