Sky Sports News (Sky Sports News)

Member Name: carlmcq

Product:	Sky Sports News
Date:	03/08/09 (110 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Dedicated Sports News

Disadvantages: Repetition

So here's a TV channel that's been reviewed plenty of times by plenty of people, yet few get fed up of reading about it?? Why? Because it's the freeview-made-famous station Sky Sports News.

Available on Freeview channel 83 and Sky channel 405, it's a 24-hour rolling news station because, apparently, sports warrants this much coverage. Or perhaps more cynically, Sky pump that much money into their sports coverage, a 'news' channel is the least they can provide to the majority for free with having to subscribe to their sports package.

Hosted by two newsreaders, normally a man and a woman, although some times it can be just same-sex pairings, they do all the things any normal news station would do. Deliver the headlines, breaking news and in-depth interviews with important figures from the world of sport.

The on-screen information can be very confusing, and it certainly comes across as there's too much going on throughout the screen. On the right-hand side is an stats bar, often including details about league tables, fixtures, top goalscorers etc over a variety of sports, but predominantly football as you may expect. Below the presenters is another bar with news in briefs constantly rolling on screen, and beneath that again, a very thin bar with details of programmes coming up on the Sky Sports channels, or fixtures, or indeed when it turns yellow (Ooo, exciting) then it becomes breaking news.

WIth Sky's great coverage of a number of sports, the clips played and packages shown by their journalists are often detailed and give an excellent portrayal as a dedicated sports channel. But some sports which they don't have rights to are often completely overlooked. And I mean completely. Back when Setanta was somewhat of a threat to Sky Sports, certain events such as box office boxing weren't even scraped across by Sky Sports if they were being covered by Sky Sports. The same applies to some extent to sporting events shown on terrestrial stations, but this will have more to do with owning the rights to the coverage, and often the fair-dealing principle (I'm going into media law talk here) will only apply to Sky News being able to show clips of Formula 1, for example.

One slight disappointment with the channel is the repetition of news stories, that are clearly being simply repeated without even a change to scripting. This will often happen through the early hours of the night, when naturally fewer people will be watching so therefore some production levels will drop (not a professional way of doing things at all). However, watch any rolling news channel for long enough and you will become bored of the output as there's only so much news that'll interest the target audience and have enough about it to produce a news story. It's just a shame that, especially outside the football season, Sky Sports News has a lot of this, despite it's dedication and impressive coverage of other sports such as rugby, cricket, tennis and golf for example.

So, there you have it. A television station dedicated solely for us sports fanatics out there. If only they just straightened the edges around the clock, then what is already a hit could be a phenomenon...in sporting rolling news terms that is!

Summary: Just the job for sports fans