THE HISTORY OF A FORMER DSTV CHANNEL
ESPN Classic is an American multinational pay television network that is owned by ESPN Inc., a joint venture between The Walt Disney Company (which owns a controlling 80% stake) and Hearst Communications (which owns 20%).
ESPN Classic is an American multinational pay television network that is owned by ESPN Inc., a joint venture between The Walt Disney Company (which owns a controlling 80% stake) and Hearst Communications (which owns 20%).
The channel was originally launched as the Classic Sports Network in 1995, and was acquired by ESPN in 1997. The network originally focused on carrying classic sporting events, other programs and documentaries, and live specials (such as the Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony) focusing on sports history.
By the 2010s, due to the increasing number of sport-, league-, and college conference-specific networks that had assumed rights to the archive content that was historically aired by ESPN Classic, a larger amount of programming was devoted to archive content whose rights were owned by ESPN outright, reruns of recent events from ESPN's networks, as well as ESPN original documentaries, and overflow coverage of events from other ESPN networks.
In 2014, ESPN began to phase out ESPN Classic as a linear service, and transition it to a branded video on-demand offering. A number of major providers, such as AT&T, Altice USA, Comcast, and Verizon Fios dropped ESPN Classic in the years that followed. Due to this change in format, ESPN News and ESPN's digital platforms have supplanted its role as an overflow service.
The channel was available across all packages on DStv before it shuttered down.
No comments:
Post a Comment