Sky Box Office
British pay-per-view service
Sky Box Office is Sky's pay-per-view (PPV) system operated in the United Kingdom and Ireland. There were three branded divisions of Sky Box Office – Sky Cinema Box Office (formerly Sky Movies Box Office), Sky Sports Box Office and Sky 3D Box Office. Until 1 February 2011, the system ran under unified Sky Box Office branding. On 4 January 2017, all Sky Cinema Box Office channels ceased broadcasting, with only Sky Sports Box Office remaining available.
History
Early History
In February 1996, Sky announced that the upcoming Frank Bruno vs. Mike Tyson II boxing match set for 16 March would be broadcast as a pay-per-view event for the price of £9.99, and would promote it as being the first PPV broadcast in the United Kingdom. While Sky Sports had already broadcast World Wrestling Federation and other sporting events that were available through pay-per-view in the United States, they were always broadcast at no extra cost with a standard Sky Sports package.
Initially, events available through Sky Box Office were ordered by telephone, either on the day of broadcast for £14.95 or in advance at a reduced price of £9.99. Ordering an event charged the viewer, and then the subscriber's VideoCrypt viewing card would be activated over the air, enabling the broadcast to be viewed. The charge would be levied unless the viewer cancelled before broadcast or returned the viewing card as proof that the event hadn't been watched.
The public source identifies “Sky Box Office” as british pay-per-view service. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Office, British and pay-per-view.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7537257. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2011, 2017 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sky Box Office” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.