The channel was founded as a joint venture between Jerry Buss, majority owner of the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Kings, and cable television pioneer Bill Daniels, who held a minority ownership interest in both professional sports franchises, which carried most of their NBA and NHL games on the network.
Prime Ticket was headquartered in a small office building across the street from the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, then the home stadium of the Kings and Lakers.
Prime Ticket caught on with cable subscribers in Southern California as it was founded at the height of the Lakers' 1980s championship run, and later got a boost from the trade of Wayne Gretzky to the Kings in 1988.
In 1989, Daniels partnered with cable television provider Tele-Communications Inc. to form a new group of regional sports networks.
The partnership also purchased Dallas-based Home Sports Entertainment and its share of Orlando-based Sunshine Network.
The move was part an alignment of the networks that would include a shift towards a common schedule of programming across the networks, outside each outlet's own regionally exclusive sports telecasts (including the incorporation of sports-related programs aimed at women and children, and the launch of a twice-nightly national sports news program, titled Press Box; the name originated from a local sports highlights show on Prime Ticket that began airing in 1990).
Liberty also created an in-house sales service to sell national advertisements for the regional networks (replacing Group W Sports Marketing).
[8] Liberty and News Corporation created Fox/Liberty Networks as a holding company for the co-owned regional sports properties.
In addition, Prime also televised a great deal of American Speed Association races during the late 1980s and most of the 1990s, sharing the broadcast rights with TNN (now Paramount Network).
Prime also televised a number of NASCAR Busch Series races, including the Goody's 300 at Daytona, in the early 1990s.