Broadcasting of sports events
Sports broadcasters have a variety of sections to deliver footage and their job can provide postgame coverage and interviews with athletes and coaches.
[8] In 1933, Hewitt called an olympic games-wide radio broadcast of an NHL game between the Detroit Red Wings and the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Terrestrial television broadcasts of CFL games ended in 2008, when TSN acquired exclusive TV rights to the league.
American sports broadcasts are widely available in Canada, both from Canadian stations and from border blasters in the United States.
The first live commentary on a field sport anywhere in Europe was when Paddy Mehigan covered the All-Ireland Hurling Semi-Final between Kilkenny and Galway on 29 August 1926.
This game is credited with being the first mainly because the BBC was prevented from broadcasting sporting events before 7.00pm as a means of protecting British newspaper sales.
One prominent figure was Seán Óg Ó Ceallacháin who broadcast for the Gaelic Games and live commentary weekly beginning in 1930.
Two weeks later the first broadcast of a football match took place, with the BBC covering Arsenal's league fixture against Sheffield United at Highbury.
The first sporting event to be televised in the UK was an international boxing tournament between England and Ireland from Alexandra Palace on 4 February 1937.
Depending on the league and event, telecasts are often shown live on network television (traditionally on weekends and during major events — either national through a television network, or in some cases, regionally syndicated by an operation such as Raycom Sports or a team), and nationally available cable channels (such as ESPN or Fox Sports 1).
Pay-per-view broadcasts are typically restricted to combat sports such as boxing, mixed martial arts or professional wrestling.
Internet broadcasts are also common, though college and major professional sports either use a pay wall or subscriber-based systems such as TV Everywhere to extract payment.
[21] The broadcasting of college football games on television in the United States has been a fixture of the major networks on a continuous basis since that time.
The price for the NFL's broadcast rights has increased steadily over the past several decades, in part because of bidding wars between the numerous networks and the fear of losing stature due to the loss of NFL programming; as of the most recent contract the league nets annual fees of over $6 billion, or half of the league's overall revenue, from television rights alone.
The first-ever television broadcast of a basketball game occurred on 28 February 1940 when the University of Pittsburgh defeated Fordham at Madison Square Garden on NBC station W2XBS.
TVS Television Network helped popularize the broadcasts of college basketball and also gave an outlet to the short-lived World Football League.
Within several years of ESPN's founding as a basic cable channel, it had developed a stable of sports broadcasts ranging from major leagues to oddities.
One of the first live high-definition sports broadcasts in the U.S. took place in September 1998 in which a football game between Ohio State and West Virginia, aired on WBNS-TV.
It is widely considered the first ever live sports game in HD in the U.S. produced using a production truck and transmission vehicle from NHK, Japan's national public broadcasting organization.
[23] The Internet has also allowed greater broadcasting of sports events, both in video and audio forms and through free and subscription channels.
Individual leagues (including major ones) all have subscription services that allow subscribers to watch their sporting events for a fee.
The game was delivered on RealVideo, a compressed video format, on the RealPlayer media player platform on the station's website.
This prevented the footage of any major Premier League football game being shown on free-to-air television until much later that evening as highlights, something the European Commission disapproved of.
Following warnings of legal action to stop the monopoly, an announcement was made that an alternative structure would be in place when the contract ended in 2007.
These limitations can be legally overlooked by purchasing out-of-market sports packages, such as MLB Extra Innings or NFL Sunday Ticket.
In 1977, these restrictions were deemed to be invalid when a federal district court ruled that the FCC did not have the authority to make such decisions in a consolidated case, also noting that the constitutional basis for such a law had not been proven.
[28] By the mid-2000s and early 2010s, most major U.S. sports leagues (barring the National Football League, which has historically stipulated that all games be shown on terrestrial television in at least the markets of the teams involved) had begun to steadily decrease their presence on broadcast television, and allow more of their content (including post-season coverage in many cases) to air on cable networks, and more recently, digital-only outlets.
The NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament and national championship games in college football have also largely moved to cable (since 2016, the semi-finals of the former only air on broadcast television in odd-numbered years).
[33] The National Hockey League survives on Canadian broadcast television because Rogers Sportsnet, the cable broadcaster that acquired exclusive rights to the league in 2014, offers two weekly games to CBC Television for free to allow the network to continue the long-running Hockey Night in Canada.
The Longhorn Network, in which ESPN owned a stake, was even more specialized, designed as an outlet for the athletic program of the University of Texas at Austin (although it has also aired football games of the UT system's San Antonio campus).
