Up to the minute sports coverage (Sky Sports News)

Member Name: paulie1975

Product:	Sky Sports News
Date:	15/08/09 (40 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great to dip in and out of for non sky users

Disadvantages: None

As somebody who has Freeview but not Sky I find Sky Sports News to be a fantastic channel, it is basically a 24 hour sports channel, which means that it will be first with exclusive sports stories but also means that you can only watch it for short periods of the day as it repeats its stories at least every half hour meaning you are watching the same feed over and over again with different presenters.

On Channel 83 on Freeview, this is essential viewing in my house, it will go through all the days sport and preview it and then once everything has happened it will review it with pundits interviews and occasionally highlights of goals or important incidents.

Something else it does well is during big evenings of football it will invite old footballers such as Paul Merson, tony Gale, Matt Le Tissier and others to commentate on matches from the studio, whilst and old head like Jeff Stelling anchors the programme, this is especially true on Saturdays when Stelling astutely anchors super Saturday a programme following every match in the league over the afternoon.

Its great fun with good banter and while some of the pundits are a bit old and opinionated its still a really good laugh and very informative.
This is such a success they now do the same for Rugby when its a big weekend with people like Stuart Barnes sitting in the studio to commentate for people without Sky coverage.

The day is made up of:
Afternoon Report
Evening Update
Good Morning Sports Fans
Through the Night
Sky Sports News at Ten

These are essentially the same programme but it gives the channel the chance to change presenters and the format ever so slightly to keep it all fresh.


The channel is excellent for football coverage, as well as rugby, boxing, cricket and almost everything else, it does shamelessly plug its other channels however I rate it very highly the presenters are very professional in the style of US anchormen and it really is informative to switch in and out of for the latest sporting news, it is the first place I go to find out results or anything else nowadays and is a great selling point for the sky package as a whole.

Pluses:
Professional presenters
Excellent journalists
Good Format, fast incisive stories, with breaking news at the bottom of the screen
Excellent football coverage on evenings and weekends

Minuses:
You can only dip in and out of it, due to the repeated nature of the stories
If your waiting to find out about one thing you may have to sit through 5 minutes of Speedway or Motor Racing reviews until your story repeats again.

Overall I enjoy the channel in moderation, first thing in the morning i'll catch up on what happened overnight from football in South America or Asia to American sports and in the evening i'll catch up on what I missed at work, its fast food television, but it works really well.

Summary: Up to the minute sports coverage