In the year, Sky Sports secured new broadcast rights, witnessed historic live events and set a new audience record.

Sky Sports offered over 36,000 hours of coverage across five dedicated sports channels, secured new programming contracts and extended interactive coverage to new sports events.

It gave subscribers a diverse schedule of live sports programming throughout the year and from around the world, including victory for England’s cricketers in the Caribbean and teams from every participating nation in rugby union’s Heineken Cup.

Among the year’s landmarks were Sky’s first live UEFA Champions League matches and a new record audience, when England’s Euro 2004 Qualifier against Turkey, in October 2003, attracted Sky’s largest-ever audience, with an in-home peak of 4.2 million viewers.

Other rating successes of the year included the Super League’s Play-Offs, Spanish La Liga football, NFL American Football and the World Darts Championship. Sky Sports’ first season of live UEFA Champions League coverage attracted strong ratings, critical acclaim and praise from governing body UEFA. Sky digital customers could use interactivity to choose from up to 8 live matches being played simultaneously.

During the year Sky Sports also won new deals for live Spanish La Liga football, live Welsh home international football, and secured new agreements with the English Football Association and the FA Premier League. Exclusively-live rights to a number of World Cup qualifiers were also secured, including the opening matches for England and Wales in September 2004.

The 2004-05 season will be the most televised football campaign ever on Sky Sports, with over 450 live games from a range of competitions.

Following the award of four live packages of FA Premier League rights to Sky in August 2003, Sky viewers will now be able to watch more live matches from the Barclays Premiership. Sky Sports will show 88 live matches, 22 more than previously, with an extra 50 live matches offered on the pay-per-view service, PremPlus. Sky Sports also holds a new near-live package of rights. These will be broadcast in a new ‘Football First’ programme, which will offer extended highlights of every Premiership match played that day, with viewers able to choose which match they watch through Sky Sports’ interactive service.

The year was also the busiest ever for rugby union production, with over 100 live matches stretching through every month of the year. A new deal for European Heineken Cup Rugby brought comprehensive coverage, with up to five live matches from each round.

Live cricket was also broadcast throughout the year and featured every domestic county and every Test nation. England’s tour to the West Indies produced their first tour victory in the Caribbean for 34 years and the highest cricket audiences for two years.

At home, the domestic Twenty20 Cup, a new event in 2003, was a ratings success, attracting audiences three times the size of its predecessor, the B&H Cup.

In rugby league, a new deal was concluded for the domestic Super League, Great Britain internationals and a new Tri-Nations tournament. In boxing, a new deal with Sports Network saw British World champions, Joe Calzaghe and Ricky Hatton, continue to be covered on Sky Sports. Meanwhile, Sky Box Office offered world title fights featuring Lennox Lewis, Oscar De La Hoya and Bernard Hopkins.

Sky Sports News marked its fifth anniversary in October 2003, with record audiences, which had doubled year-on-year. The channel, which was the first all-new digital channel at launch, is now available on digital terrestrial and cable services as well as on the Sky DTH platform.

Sky Sports Xtra, which launched on Sky digital in 1999, extended its reach by more than two million homes as carriage deals were concluded with Telewest and ntl.

Skysports.com also set new records, with its highest-ever, audited figures of more than 113 million page impressions and over 3.6 million unique users in June 2004 (Source: ABCe). It is now established as the UK’s most–visited commercial sports site.