ESPN is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by The Walt Disney Company and Hearst Communications (20%) through the joint venture ESPN Inc. The company was founded in 1979 by Bill Rasmussen, Scott Rasmussen and Ed Eagan.
ESPNU is an American multinational digital cable and satellite sports television channel owned by ESPN Inc., a joint venture between The Walt Disney Company and the Hearst Communications. The channel is primarily dedicated to coverage of college athletics, and is also used as an additional outlet for general ESPN programming. ESPNU is based alongside its sister networks at ESPN's headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut.
College football on television includes the broad- and cablecasting of college football games, as well as pre- and post-game reports, analysis, and human-interest stories. Within the United States, the college version of American football annually garners high television ratings.
ESPN3 is an online streaming service owned by ESPN Inc., a joint venture between The Walt Disney Company and Hearst Communications, that provides live streams and replays of global sports events to sports fans in the United States.
Raycom Sports is a Charlotte, North Carolina–based producer of sports television programs owned by Gray Television.
ESPN Events is an American multinational sporting event promoter owned by ESPN Inc. It is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, and shares its operations with SEC Network and formerly with ESPNU. The corporation organizes sporting events for broadcast across the ESPN family of networks, including, most prominently, a group of college football bowl games and in-season college basketball tournaments.
In North America, an out-of-market sports package is a form of subscription television that broadcasts sporting events to areas where the events were unable to be seen by viewers on other broadcast and cable television networks due to the games not being broadcast in their local market.
College Football on CBS Sports is the blanket title used for broadcasts of college football games that are produced by CBS Sports, for CBS and CBS Sports Network.
ESPN College Football is the branding used for broadcasts of NCAA Division I FBS college football across ESPN properties, including ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3, ESPN+, ABC, ESPN Classic, ESPNU, ESPN Deportes, ESPNews and ESPN Radio. ESPN College Football debuted in 1982.
MLB Extra Innings is an out-of-market sports package distributed in North America by satellite provider DirecTV since 1996 and by most cable providers since 2001. The package allowed its subscribers to see up to 80 out-of-market Major League Baseball games a week using local over the air stations and regional sports networks.
ESPN Australia is the Australian division of ESPN, part of the ESPN International grouping. It is offered in Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands.
ESPN Full Court was an out-of-market sports package in the United States that carried college basketball games. The package consisted of about 150 games annually, from the season tipoff in November to the first two rounds of the NCAA Women's Division I Basketball Championship in mid- to late-March. The suggested retail price was $109 for the entire season, $75 for a half-season, and $19.95 for a single day. The season package was renewable. Full-season packages were not available for the online version.
ESPN Classic was an American multinational pay television network owned by ESPN Inc., a joint venture between The Walt Disney Company and Hearst Communications.
In the United States, sports are televised on various broadcast networks, national and specialty sports cable channels, and regional sports networks. U.S. sports rights are estimated to be worth a total of $22.42 billion in 2019, about 44 percent of the total worldwide sports media market. U.S. networks are willing to pay a significant amount of money for television sports contracts because it attracts large amounts of viewership; live sport broadcasts accounted for 44 of the 50 list of most watched television broadcasts in the United States in 2016.
ACC Network was a syndicated package of college sports telecasts featuring football and basketball events from the Atlantic Coast Conference, produced by Raycom Sports, the sports syndication unit of Montgomery, Alabama-based Raycom Media.
Longhorn Network (LHN) was an American regional sports network owned as a joint venture between The University of Texas at Austin, ESPN and Learfield, and was operated by ESPN. The network, which launched on August 26, 2011, focused on the Texas Longhorns varsity sports teams of the University of Texas at Austin, and broadcast programs such as pre- and post-game shows, event replays, coach's shows, original series and documentaries chronicling the Longhorns and their history, and live coverage of Longhorns events not carried by other Big 12 Conference media partners.
The history of the National Football League on television documents the long history of the National Football League on television. The NFL, along with boxing and professional wrestling, was a pioneer of sports broadcasting during a time when baseball and college football were more popular than professional football. Due to the NFL understanding television at an earlier time, they were able to surpass Major League Baseball in the 1960s as the most popular sport in the United States. Today, NFL broadcasting contracts are among the most valuable in the world.
Sportsnet PPV is a Canadian pay-per-view (PPV) service owned by Rogers Communications. It is the PPV service used by Rogers Cable, Cogeco Cable and Source Cable for offering out-of-market sports packages and occasionally other special events. Since October 1, 2014, Rogers and Source have also used Sportsnet PPV as their main general-interest pay-per-view provider, replacing Viewers Choice which shut down the previous evening. The service is co-branded with Rogers' sports channel Sportsnet.
ESPN College Extra was an American multinational out-of-market sports package owned by ESPN Inc. It was launched on September 5, 2015, as a merger of the existing ESPN Full Court and ESPN GamePlan, each of which offered college basketball and college football broadcasts respectively, and closed down on August 15, 2023.
ESPN+ is an American over-the-top subscription video streaming service available in the United States, owned by the ESPN division of the Walt Disney Company, in partnership with ESPN Inc., which is a joint venture between The Walt Disney Company and the Hearst Communications. It is one of Disney's three flagship subscription streaming brands in the United States, alongside Disney+ and Hulu, and operates using technology of Disney subsidiary BAMTech, now known as Disney Streaming.
