Wikipedia
Sportsnet is a Canadian English-language sports specialty service. Established in 1998 as CTV Sportsnet by a joint venture between CTV, Liberty Media, and Rogers Media, the network has since been majority-owned (and as of 2004, owned outright) by Rogers, as CTV parent Bell Globemedia was required to divest its stake in the network following its 2001 acquisition of competing network TSN.
The Sportsnet license comprises four 24-hour programming services; Sportsnet was originally licensed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) as a category A service, operating as a group of regional sports networks offering programming tailored to each feed's region (in contrast to TSN, which was licensed at the time to operate as a national sports service, and could only offer limited regional opt-outs). Since 2011, the service has operated under deregulated category C licensing, which allows Sportsnet to operate multiple feeds with no restrictions on alternate programming. In each region, only the local Sportsnet channel is available on analogue cable, but all four channels are available nationally via digital cable (subject to blackouts for some out-of-market teams).
The four Sportsnet feeds air some common programming and simulcast major, national events, but are capable of airing programming autonomously—most prominently regional programming. Sportsnet is the national cable rightsholder of the National Hockey League, and also holds regional rights to five of the league's Canadian franchises. It is also the national rightsholder of Major League Baseball in Canada (although most of ESPN's MLB broadcasts are sub-licensed to rival network TSN), and the exclusive broadcaster of the co-owned Toronto Blue Jays. It also splits regional coverage of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Toronto Raptors with TSN; Rogers Communications and TSN's parent company Bell Canada own a joint majority stake in the teams' parent company.
The Sportsnet brand has since been extended beyond the original regional channels, now encompassing the national channels Sportsnet 360, Sportsnet One (and its regional part-time companion channels), and Sportsnet World; Sportsnet Radio stations in Toronto and Calgary; and Sportsnet Magazine. With these brand extensions, Rogers now generally uses "Sportsnet" (by itself) to denote its sports media properties as a whole, and on-air promotions for programs being carried nationally by these four regional feeds often list all four channels separately, or refer to the Sportsnet "regional" (or "main") channels, to avoid any ambiguity. However, standalone mentions of "Sportsnet" in reference to a specific channel can still generally be assumed to be referring to the four regional channels (or the specific regional channel available locally on analogue cable).
According to Rogers, Sportsnet is available in 8.2 million Canadian homes.
Sportsnet is group of Canadian regional sports networks.
Sportsnet may also refer to:
- Comcast SportsNet, the group of American regional sports networks owned by Comcast/NBCUniversal
- Time Warner Cable SportsNet (disambiguation), American regional sports networks owned by Time Warner Cable
- Fox Sports Networks, the group of American regional sports networks previously known as Fox SportsNet
- SportsNet New York, an American regional sports network