'BT have been promoted as a kind of rebel alliance to Sky's imperial death star'. Illustration: Cameron Law

It was the 30-year anniversary last week of Sky TV's first UK satellite broadcast, a date that somehow passed largely unmarked, no doubt due in part to a widespread perception of Rupert Murdoch and his corporation as some sort of low-browed, profiteering, amoral, sociopathic corporate mega-parasite. This does seem a little graceless in the circumstances. Fair is only fair and sometimes you just have to take your hat off all the same. With this in mind this page may as well be the first to say it out loud. Happy low-browed, profiteering, amoral, sociopathic corporate mega-parasite 30th anniversary!

Obviously, that's just a little joke – and not just for legal reasons either as the fact is, like so many popular bogeymen, not least those of the quaveringly aghast political left, Murdoch himself is a more difficult figure to pin down. It might be convenient to dismiss the most significant living Australian as a kind of sulphurous aberration, but the fact is his achievements are both intricately wrought and, when it comes to English football, pretty much undo-able. He remains the founding father of the new world, those satellite dishes that first began appearing like a fungal infection across tower blocks and suburban streets 30 years ago resembling now the open pores, the great yawning liver spots of the impermeable Murdoch-skin stretched across every street, every piece of footballing infrastructure, enclosing an entire sporting industry within an airtight Murdoch membrane.

The reason for mentioning this now is not so much the missed anniversary as its coincidence with the first set of financial results for BT Sport, Sky's latest competitor and the first to actively market itself as a chattier, nicer, less frighteningly jackbooted alternative. This is no doubt a smart move on BT's part, who have been promoted as a kind of rebel alliance to Sky's imperial death star, a pop-up farmer's market of a TV channel headed up by Jake Humphrey and his magical striding world of sport.

It is a smart piece of timing, helped in recent weeks by the fact Sky seems to have gone slightly mad in some areas of its programming, not so much broadcasting live football on Monday nights as staging a forensic re-enactment of the Kennedy assassination. Jamie Carragher in particular – while obviously very good and very bright – still seems painfully intense on screen, like a man being publicly talked down from a rooftop siege, writhing and sweating and blurting out his grievances, while Gary Neville smiles and nods and edges closer, one hand on his taser.

Next to this BT Sport does seem lighter, more conversational, more agreeably Ewok-ish. Yet according to the latest figures it is already struggling, ratings for its live Premier League football worse than those for all the been-and-gone pretenders, worse even than Setanta, with its faded green and yellows, its wobbling sets, its sad-eyed presenters with broken smiles. No doubt this is in part to do with simply growing the business, not to mention poor scheduling, with BT basing its week around the graveyard-shift Saturday lunchtime Premier League game. It is, though, part of a wider narrative.

We have, let's face it, been here before. My first job in journalism was on the website of the unlamented ITV Sport Channel, launched on the outer edge of the first internet boom, a time of start-ups and land-grabs, of brave, clueless internet frontiersmen decisively skewering the digital future three times every morning before breakfast.

At ITV the big earth-changing gimmick was live, typed text commentary scrolling in a box next to the game. Quite why anybody ever thought this was a brilliant idea still isn't clear, but this is often the way of these things: someone important but clueless has a Big Idea, in this case an idea that saw us towards the end diligently typing live text commentary on matches that were watched, technically, by zero human beings, by no people, an audience so negligible it was in fact indivisible (after a while we got into a habit of simply typing in word for word whatever David Pleat said on co-commentary – "They need to get tighter on the wide players" "West Brom all bunched up in the centre" "The game opening up now").

ITV Sport Channel failed for the same reason all these sub-Sky ventures fail, because they are, in effect, simply a pastry frill around the edge of a pie that has already been divvied up. And this is really the point about all this. The appearance of BT Sport – which is in fact not a magical sporting farmer's market, but a gambit in the tactical repositioning of a communications giant – is further evidence of the degree to which English football has turned itself inside out for television. It is now almost entirely a televisual business, success defined not by cups or crowds but by simply remaining on Premier League television for another year. Having an interest in football or supporting a team has become a kind of consumer weakness to be exploited, the equivalent of accidentally smiling at a salesman in a shopping mall and finding yourself slammed up against the window of JD Sports by some hair-gelled predator with a clipboard.

It is hard not to wish BT Sport well, if only for the degree of energy expended in its conception. But it is hard also to avoid the feeling Sky Sports welcomes these intrusions, offering as they do the illusion of competition, while also enlarging the TV rights pot and thereby improving the basic product. A flex of the elbow was all it took to stop BT acquiring anything like a dangerous stake. Share prices are up. Audiences are up. And, in the end, all of this simply emphasises the scale of Sky's achievement. It is worth restating in anniversary week, but what has happened here is a very British kind of carve-up, a daring, bloody and irreversible industry transformation by a single interventionist provider.

Thirty years on from that first broadcast, and 22 years on from the moment the competition was decisively blown out of the water, we are all still looking out through Rupert's eyes.