Sports Television: Past and Present

When I was a kid in the 1980s, sports on television was worlds different than it is now. Besides "Monday Night Football," the occasional abortive attempts by ABC and NBC to emulate the MNF model for baseball, and perhaps a few local stations bringing you your market's basketball and baseball games, you had to wait for weekends for sports.

Even ESPN was something of a novelty then, and it took it several years for the network to land a major sports league. Before that, they showed a lot of USFL, CFL, and Australian Rules Football.

There was no such thing as a regional sports network. I take that back. There was such a thing, but not in Cleveland, my home market. Until one glorious day when I noticed a new channel in the TV guide: "Sportschannel Ohio."

Alas, it was a premium channel, and my parents refused to subscribe to anything but basic cable.

The good news was the signal was only scrambled at night, when they actually had programming. During the day, Sportschannel ran this sort of precursor to the tickers so common today.

While elevator music played, a full screen would come up with the box score and brief recap of each baseball game (for example; they covered all sports) that was played the day before. After about 30 seconds, the screen would move on to the next game. These screens with box scores and recaps resembled screenshots from an old Texas Instruments computer, complete with a "picture" that is hard to describe (a computerized photograph is the closest I can come) of the relevant athlete to the box score or news story.

Just like some people watch "SportsCenter" on repeat all morning long, so did I with this ticker. I could even hum some of the elevator tunes today. Nostalgia.

I later learned that Sportschannel Ohio was part of a larger group called Sportschannel America, and included all sorts of different regional stations like Sportschannel Florida and Sportschannel Bay Area. Does this sound familiar? It should, because it was the forerunner of regional sportscasting as we know it today.

Eventually Sportschannel dissolved and was snapped up by NewsCorp, who owns FOX. That is why today we have FOX Sports Ohio and FOX Sports Southwest. Others joined with Comcast instead of FOX.

With each major market getting its own, larger part of the sports pie, it was time for ESPN to make a move ... which they did, launching ESPN2.

Not many seem to remember ESPN2 started out very differently than ESPN. It was the young, irreverent sports channel. They had their own stylized lower-case font, and when they showed an athlete being interviewed or his highlights being shown, they would put a "funny" caption in that font under his name (an example: jim everett - don't call me chris, ok!).

I guess the approach did not work too well in the ratings, because before long ESPN2 became like it is today: a clone of ESPN, with no difference in tone, style, or content.

Thus, the sports broadcasting landscape started to resemble the format we recognize today, with ESPN's ever-burgeoning television and video-streaming portfolio being a strictly national affair, and the regional sports networks are increasing and starting to become independent, or at least breaking away from the FOX/Comcast marque.

The latest of these developments just occurred on April 1st. Viewers in Denver, Seattle, and Pittsburgh expecting to see FOX Sports Rocky Mountain, FOX Sports Northwest, and FOX Sports Pittsburgh, respectively, are now getting Root Sports Rocky Mountain, Northwest, and Pittsburgh.

Root Sports is owned by DirecTV and will still receive most of their programming from FOX Sports. However, they promise to make the Root Sports experience more "immersive" by including relevant tweets during games and — are you sitting down? — "a camera following a manager to the mound during pitching changes." I'm excited, too.

That said, regional sports networks definitely have their niche in local programming. If you are a subscriber to FOX Sports Bay Area, you might see talk shows and interview/coach's shows for each of the Bay Area major pro sports teams, plus Cal, Stanford, and San Jose State.

ESPN's niche is national, of course, but also in live streaming. If your ISP has an agreement with ESPN3, it gives you entree into an absolutely staggering amount of sports, including most of the games aired on ESPN and ESPN2, their college football and basketball packages, and plenty of coverage of sports ESPN proper does not televise such as a full day's worth of action in non-major tennis tournaments and non-U.S. centric sports like rugby, cricket, and various European soccer leagues.

FOX Sports and their affiliates, as well as regional sports television as a whole, lag way, way behind in this regard. CBS and NBC also regularly stream sporting events, particularly college sports, on their websites. But not FOX Sports.

All in all, there is no comparison between ESPN and regional sports networks: it's a tie. Hardcore sports fans need both.