[Kojak]

Sky News is loss making as others have mentioned elsewhere. France has a similar population size but has four news channels, three private. But the private ones, based on people's description, are very tabloid in nature and are like Fox, GB and Talk. News channels are not sustainable let alone profitable unless they take the route like those in the US.

How many domestic news channels are there in other countries? It would be interesting to see. These come to mind for me:
The US have many because they're wealthy, with a much larger geography and population and pure commentary programming for news channels is acceptable. None are publicly owned IIRC.
Australia has two, ABC and Sky.
Canada has two national ones in English and another two in French, one private and one public for each official language. Two private local news channels.
Denmark have one, publicly owned with ads. Same for Norway but privately owned. But New Zealand with a similar population sizes as the Scandinavian ones has no news channels.

In France, only BFMTV is profitable. It's not as tabloidy as it used to be, and it's brilliant for rolling news and breaking news, but it's nothing like what you'd find on Sky or on the BBC. As they found out when they shifted away from being solely a newswheel, people don't want to watch what they think is just 'boring' news! Though that being said, they get about roughly 2% of total audience share with their daytime rolling news, which I believe is far higher than anything in the UK?

It has a really good slot (channel 15) on the French version of Freeview. AIUI its format is not a million miles away from that of Sky News 15-20 years ago.