March 1998 (Revised August 1998)
Case
HBS Case Collection

BSkyB

Format:Print
| Pages:19

Abstract

In 1983, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought a floundering two-year-old British company called Satellite Television plc. and renamed it Sky. Without external financing, without having been allocated any space on Britain's existing satellites, and over the opposition of some of Britain's most formidable media competitors, Sky quickly became the dominant force in Britain's satellite television market. By 1990, when it merged with its largest competitor to form BSkyB, Murdoch's upstart company had signed 1.2 million homes to its subscription television services. It had also wholly changed the face of commercial television in Britain. The case describes how BSkyB triumphed so quickly and so completely, and how it carefully structured both its commercial and political relationships. It then examines a host of recent challenges facing the company: increased competition from "new media" firms; advanced technologies for digitization and the further compression of data; and regulation that now emanates from Brussels, as well as from London.