The company was founded by Craig Heatley, Terry Jarvis, Trevor Farmer and Alan Gibbs in 1987 as Sky Media Limited.

It was formed to investigate beaming sports programming into nightclubs and pubs using high performance 4-metre satellite dishes by Jarvis and an engineering associate Brian Green, but was redirected into pay television following successful bidding in early 1990 for four groups of UHF frequencies in the Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga regions.

The first Sky subscriber was former Speaker of the House of Representatives Jonathan Hunt, according to Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand.

Later, funding allowed Sky to extend its coverage throughout most of New Zealand: In 1991, the company expanded to Rotorua, Wellington and Christchurch.

Then in 1994, the company expanded to Hawke's Bay, Manawatu, Southland and Otago, followed by the Wairarapa, Taupō, and Wanganui regions in 1995.

NICAM stereo was eventually removed from Sky Movies, the CNN channel was discontinued in 2004 with the UHF frequencies issued to Māori Television.

[5] Sky used a portion of the freed up UHF and radio spectrum to launch its joint venture, Igloo, in December 2012.

[7] A SkyMail email service was featured for a time starting November 2002,[8] but was later pulled due to lack of interest (including the wireless keyboards they had produced for it).

The unreliability of the ageing Optus B1 satellite was highlighted when the DBS service went offline just before 7 p.m. NZST (8 a.m. London, 3 a.m. New York) on 30 March 2006.

Sky credited customers with one day's subscription fees as compensation for the downtime at a cost to the company of NZ$1.5 million.

In December 2005, Sky released its own digital video recorder (DVR), which essentially was an upgraded set top box similar to Foxtel IQ in Australia or TiVo in the United States.

Moving Picture's assets were eventually sold when Sky's sports rights increased in the mid 2000s and OSB took hold.

[15] In February 2013, News Corp announced it would be selling the 44 percent stake in Sky TV that it acquired via a merger with Independent Newspapers Ltd in 2005.

Free-to-air channels such as Prime, Edge TV and Bravo Plus 1 remain in H.262 to be accessible to non-Sky subscribers such as Freeview viewers.

The price reduction came in response to fierce competition from streaming services such as Netflix, Lightbox, and Amazon Prime Video, which had caused the loss of 38,000 satellite subscribers the previous year.

[20][21] In early March 2018, it was reported that Sky TV CEO John Fellet was pursuing talks with Netflix and Amazon Prime to share content and services.

Fellet hoped to mimic the UK-based television company Sky plc's success in negotiating a bundling package with Netflix.

[1][26] On 16 August 2019, Sky announced it had purchased Coliseum Sports Media's global rugby streaming service RugbyPass for approximately US$40 million.

Sky raised $157 million from investors with a discounted share issue to cover the cost of entering the broadband market.

[37] On 22 August 2019, it was announced that Sky had signed a six-year agreement to take over from Westpac as the naming sponsor of Wellington Regional Stadium, effective 1 January 2020.

[41] On 24 June 2021, Sky announced a partnership with Discovery New Zealand to provide coverage of The Championships, Wimbledon for free-to-air channel Three.

Sky spokesperson Chris Major stated that their decision to remove RT came following complaints from customers and consultation with the Broadcasting Standards Authority.

Discovery renewed its HBO Max programme supply agreement with Sky but decline to confirm whether it would launch its own streaming service in New Zealand.

Discovery confirmed a new partnership that would allow Sky to remain the exclusive distributor of HBO and Max content in New Zealand.

This removes the need to pre-record certain TV shows or films, because viewers can connect the updated decoder to their home broadband and choose stream content from the catalogue of options depending on which channels they subscribe to.

Neon is available for streaming on desktop or laptop on all major browsers, apps for select iPad, iPhone and Android devices, as well as PlayStation 4 and Samsung Smart TV.

In September 2019, Neon shifted to a single TV & Movies package worth $13.95 in order to compete with Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Spark New Zealand's Lightbox.

For that period, Spark will continue to provide services to Lightbox customers while Sky will be footing the operational costs.

However, on 31 July 2007 it moved its programming to horizontally polarised transponders with New Zealand-specific beams to be consistent with Freeview and to gain access to more transmission capacity.

Sky maintains ownership of the equipment and part of the customers monthly subscription cost includes the rental of the decoder.