British Sky Broadcasting Group plc (commonly known as BSkyB; trading as Sky) is a British satellite broadcasting, broadband and telephony services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom, with operations in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Formed in 1990 by the equal merger of Sky Television and British Satellite Broadcasting, BSkyB is the largest pay-TV broadcaster in the United Kingdom and Ireland with over 11 million subscribers.

BSkyB is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It had a market capitalisation of approximately £12.6 billion (US$19.8 billion) as of 23 December 2011, the 29th-largest of any company with a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange.News Corporation owns a 39.14 per cent controlling stake in the company.

Sky Television was set up by Rupert Murdoch in 1989. The SES Astra satellite network began with the launch of Astra 1A in 1989. Sky Television plc was the first customer of Astra and leased four transponders on Astra 1A ahead of its launch. Alan Sugar's Amstrad began manufacturing the original sateillite dishes and set-top boxes, something which it still does today. With the launch of more Astra satellites from 1991 onward, Sky was able to begin expanding its services, (the Astra satellites were all orbiting co-located at 19.2° east so they could be received using the same satellite dish).

James Rupert Jacob Murdoch (born 13 December 1972) is the younger son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and the deputy chief operating officer of News Corporation. He is the former chairman and chief executive of News Corp., Europe and Asia, overseeing assets such as News International (British newspapers), SKY Italia (satellite television in Italy), Sky Deutschland, and STAR TV (satellite television in Asia).

He sits on the News Corporation board of directors and is a member of the office of the chairman. He formerly held a non-executive chair at British Sky Broadcasting, in which News Corporation has a controlling minority stake.

He was formerly an executive vice president of News Corporation, the controlling shareholder of BSkyB, and served on the boards of directors of News Datacom and of News Corporation.

Murdoch is a British citizen by birth and a naturalised U.S. citizen. He lost Australian citizenship when his father became a U.S. citizen, but he is eligible to reclaim Australian citizenship.

Claudia Imhoff is a consultant in Business Intelligence and data warehousing and the co-author or author of five books and more than 100 articles on these subjects. She co-created the Corporate Information Factory architecture with Bill Inmon and is the president and founder of Intelligent Solutions and founder of the Boulder BI Brain Trust.

Julian Paul Assange ( /əˈsɒnʒ/ ə-SONZH; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian computer programmer, political/internet activist, publisher, and journalist. He is best known as the editor in chief and founder of WikiLeaks, a media website which publishes information from whistleblowers. The site acts as a conduit for worldwide news leaks, with a stated purpose of creating open governance.

WikiLeaks has published material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya, toxic waste dumping in Côte d'Ivoire, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, and banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer. In 2010, WikiLeaks published Iraq War documents and Afghan War documents about American involvement in the wars, some of which was classified material. On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five international print media partners (Der Spiegel, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian and El País) began publishing U.S. diplomatic cables.

Assange was a hacker-activist in his youth, before becoming a computer programmer and then becoming internationally renowned for his work with WikiLeaks. He has lived in several countries and has made public appearances in many parts of the world to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism. He has received numerous awards and nominations, including the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award, Readers' Choice for TIME magazine's 2010 Person of the Year, the 2011 Sydney Peace Foundation gold medal and the 2011 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.Snorre Valen, a Norwegian parliamentarian, nominated him for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.