TSN
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The Sports Network (TSN) is English Canada's leading 24-hour national television broadcaster of sports. TSN's sister station, which broadcasts similar programmes but in French, is Réseau des sports (RDS). TSN premiered in 1984, in the first group of Canadian cable channels. It was designed as a Canadian version of ESPN, the extremely successful American all-sports cable channel.
Today the majority owner of TSN is Bell Globemedia, which also owns the CTV network. ESPN, the American cable channel, also has a share, and TSN's programming and on-air look is now patterned after ESPN's.
TSN's flagship program is SportsCentre (based on ESPN's SportsCenter -- known as SportsDesk until 2001), a highlights and sports news show that airs several times a day.
The network covers all major national and international sports: National Hockey League, National Football League, UEFA soccer and Canadian Football League games, Formula One and NASCAR auto racing, Major League Baseball, plus a limited schedule of Toronto Blue Jays NBA, Toronto Raptors. It also features professional wrestling in the form of WWE's flagship show, WWE RAW. Unfortunately for Canadian fans, TSN edits the program for repeats. Only extremely violent scenes (such as heavy beatings or displacement of a large amount of blood) will be censored live. A portion of TSN's programming comes from ESPN, including the latter network's National Football League coverage. In fact, the majority of TSN's sports coverage is made up of American broadcasts, from both U.S. cable and over-the-air networks. Notable exceptions to the American broadcasts being relayed by TSN include curling, and Formula One racing, whose broadcasts TSN produces themselves, with their own commentary teams.
In early 2005, TSN was part of the consortium that won the Canadian broadcast rights to the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, as well as the 2012 Summer Olympics. This was considered a serious coup, as the rival CBC had consistently won Olympic broadcast rights from the 1996 Summer Olympics through to the 2008 Summer Olympics. CTV and TQS will be the primary broadcasters; TSN, RDS and Rogers Sportsnet will provide supplementary coverage.
Many outside of Ontario once derisively referred to TSN as the Toronto Sports Network, due to its perceived bias towards Toronto teams. This perception was taken advantage of by the network's much smaller rival Sportsnet, which launched 4 regional networks in the late 90's.
Since it's inception, TSN has been by far the most popular sports channel on Canadian cable television.
External link
- Official TSN Website (http://www.tsn.ca)