British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), which has championed first satellite and then digital television in Britain, has sought to make up for lost time online by committing £250 million sterling (€415 million) to roll out over the Internet.
The aggressive BSkyB strategy to move online and into mobile Internet is the second arrival this week of a powerful traditional media brand in the new media space.
With Reuters, the UK information group, pledging on Tuesday to spend £500 million to go online and go after the individual investor, and BSkyB aiming to develop Skysports.com and Sky.com as Britain's leading sports, entertainment and information sites, the competition has just got markedly fiercer for the small Internet start-up.
"It was only a matter of time before the big boys arrived," Ms Lorna Tilbian, media analyst at WestLB Panmure said. "`If you are a start-up, then your world should have changed this week - for the worse."
Small, but nimble, companies that offer information and entertainment online, such as Football365.com for soccer or Citywire.co.uk for financial news, have built a presence on the Web while the established media companies have struggled with the online transition.
Mr Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corporation, which controls BSkyB, has epitomised the slow, but finally full, conversion of traditional media companies to the power of the Internet.
Over the period of a year, Mr Murdoch went from dismissing the Internet as "destroying more businesses than it creates" to saying at the end of 1999 that most of News Corp's value would be "Internet related".
