ESPN: the story on HearLore

ESPN

Bill Rasmussen was fired from his job with the World Hockey Association's New England Whalers in May 1978, and that single termination became the catalyst for the most powerful sports media empire in history. Within weeks, Rasmussen and his co-founder Ed Eagan, joined by Rasmussen's son Scott who had also been let go by the Whalers, rented office space in Plainville, Connecticut. Their initial plan to base the network there was thwarted by a local ordinance prohibiting buildings from bearing rooftop satellite dishes, forcing them to find available land in Bristol, Connecticut, where the channel remains headquartered to this day. Funding to buy the property was provided by Getty Oil, which purchased 85% of the company from Bill Rasmussen on the 22nd of February 1979, in an attempt to diversify the company's holdings. This deal helped the credibility of the fledgling company, yet many still doubted the viability of a channel dedicated solely to sports. Another event that helped build ESPN's credibility was securing an advertising agreement with Anheuser-Busch in the spring of 1979, where the company invested $1 million to be the exclusive beer advertised on the network. The network officially launched on the 7th of September 1979, beginning with the first telecast of what would become the channel's flagship program, SportsCenter. Taped in front of a small live audience inside the Bristol studios, it was broadcast to 1.4 million cable subscribers throughout the United States. One month after launch, Chris Berman joined the network, and he would continue to be an on-air fixture for decades.

The March Madness Breakthrough

ESPN's next big step forward came when the channel acquired the rights to broadcast coverage of the early rounds of the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament, first airing its games in March 1980. This coverage helped bring attention to what is today known as March Madness, transforming a regional tournament into a national phenomenon. The channel's tournament coverage also launched the broadcasting career of Dick Vitale, who, at the time he joined ESPN, had just been fired as head coach of the Detroit Pistons. In April of that year, ESPN began televising the NFL draft, bringing it to a mass audience and, over time, creating a television event. That same month, the network began broadcasting Top Rank Boxing on ESPN, marking the beginning of its involvement with televised professional boxing. The show lasted 16 years, and ESPN has since shown boxing live intermittently with other shows, including ESPN Friday Night Fights and others. For a period during the 1980s, the network had boxing tournaments, crowning champions in different boxing weight divisions as ESPN champions. The next major stepping stone for ESPN came over a couple of months in 1984, when the American Broadcasting Company purchased 100% of ESPN from the Rasmussens and Getty Oil. Under Getty ownership, the channel was unable to compete for the television rights to major sports events contracts as its majority corporate parent would not provide the funding, leading ESPN to lose out for broadcast deals with the National Hockey League to USA Network and NCAA Division I college football to TBS. For years, the NFL, NBA, and Major League Baseball refused to consider cable as a means of broadcasting some of their games. However, with the backing of ABC, ESPN's ability to compete for major sports contracts greatly increased, and gave it credibility within the sports broadcasting industry.

Common questions

When was ESPN founded and where is it headquartered?

ESPN officially launched on the 7th of September 1979 and is headquartered in Bristol, Connecticut. The network moved its operations to Bristol after a local ordinance in Plainville, Connecticut, prohibited rooftop satellite dishes.

Who founded ESPN and when did ABC acquire the network?

Bill Rasmussen and Ed Eagan founded ESPN in 1978 after being fired from the World Hockey Association's New England Whalers. The American Broadcasting Company purchased 100% of ESPN from the Rasmussens and Getty Oil in 1984.

What major sports rights did ESPN secure in the 1980s and 1990s?

ESPN acquired rights to the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament in March 1980 and began televising the NFL draft in April 1980. The network secured its first NFL regular season contract in 1987 to broadcast Sunday Night Football and launched ESPN2 on the 10th of October 1993.

When did ESPN launch its streaming service and what is its current ownership structure?

ESPN began a supplemental over-the-top streaming service known as ESPN+ on the 12th of April 2018. ESPN Inc. is a joint venture of the Walt Disney Company, which holds 72% and operational control, Hearst Communications with 18%, and the National Football League with 10%.

What significant changes occurred in ESPN's leadership and programming in 2017 and 2018?

James Pitaro has been chairman since the 5th of March 2018, following the resignation of John Skipper on the 18th of December 2017. On the 12th of April 2018, ESPN began a supplemental over-the-top streaming service known as ESPN+.

How has ESPN expanded its presence in sports betting and international markets?

ESPN moved into the sports betting scene in November 2023 with plans to launch their sportsbook app ESPN Bet on November 14. The network operates regional channels in Brazil, Caribbean, Latin America, Netherlands, Oceania and Sub-Saharan Africa and holds minority stakes in The Sports Network and J Sports in Japan.

The Sunday Night Revolution

Later that year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma in 1984 that the NCAA could no longer monopolize the rights to negotiate the contracts for college football games, allowing each school to negotiate broadcast deals on its own. ESPN took full advantage and began to broadcast a large number of NCAA football games, creating an opportunity for fans to be able to view multiple games each weekend instead of just one, the same deal that the NCAA had previously negotiated with TBS. The channel's breakthrough moment occurred in 1987 when it secured a contract with the NFL to broadcast eight games during that year's regular season, all of which aired on Sunday nights, marking the first broadcasts of Sunday NFL primetime games. ESPN's Sunday Night Football games would become the highest-rated NFL telecasts for the next 17 years before losing the rights to NBC in 2006. The channel's decision to broadcast NFL games on Sunday evenings resulted in a decline in viewership for the daytime games shown on the major broadcast networks, marking the first time that ESPN had been a legitimate competitor to NBC and CBS, which had long dominated the sports television market. In 1992, ESPN launched ESPN Radio, a national sports talk radio network providing analysis and commentary programs including shows such as Mike and Mike in the Morning and The Herd as well as audio play-by-play of sporting events including some simulcast with the ESPN television channel. On the 10th of October 1993, ESPN2, a secondary channel that originally was programmed with a separate lineup of niche sports popular with males 18 to 49 years old with snowboarding and the World Series of Poker as its headliners as well as serving as an overflow channel for ESPN, launched on cable systems reaching to 10 million subscribers. It became the fastest-growing cable channel in the U.S. during the 1990s, eventually expanding its national reach to 75 million subscribers. Ownership of ABC, and thus control of ESPN, was acquired by Capital Cities Communications in 1985. ESPN's parent company renamed themselves as Capital Cities/ABC Inc. Capital Cities/ABC Inc. was then acquired by the Walt Disney Company in 1996 and was re-branded as Walt Disney Television.

The Streaming Wars Begin

Challenges began to appear in the 2000s as ESPN began to shed viewers, more than 10 million over a period of several years in the 2010s even while paying large sums of money for the broadcast rights to properties like the NFL, NBA and College Football Playoff. On the 26th of April 2017, approximately 100 ESPN employees were notified that their positions with the sports network had been terminated, among them athletes-turned-analysts Trent Dilfer and Danny Kanell, and noted journalists like NFL beat reporter Ed Werder and Major League Baseball expert Jayson Stark. Further cost-cutting measures taken included moving the studio operations of ESPNU to Bristol from Charlotte, North Carolina, reducing its longtime MLB studio show Baseball Tonight to Sundays as a lead-in to the primetime game and adding the MLB Network-produced Intentional Talk to ESPN2's daily lineup. On the 12th of April 2018, ESPN began a supplemental over-the-top streaming service known as ESPN+. After having last carried national-televised NHL games in 2004, ESPN and ABC agreed in March 2021 on a seven-year contract to televise games, with some airing on ESPN+ and Hulu. The contract also awarded four of the seven Stanley Cup Finals to both ESPN and ABC. All other nationally televised games would air on TBS and TNT under a separate deal the league struck with Turner Sports the following month. On the 8th of August 2023, ESPN and Penn Entertainment announced a deal to brand Penn's sportsbooks with ESPN branding. Penn's existing Barstool Sportsbook would be rebranded as ESPN Bet in late-2023. On the 6th of February 2024, ESPN announced a joint venture with Fox Sports and TNT Sports known as Venu Sports, including the three organizations' main linear sports channels and associated media rights. It was originally planned to launch in fall 2024. However, following legal issues including an antitrust lawsuit by FuboTV, the service was ultimately cancelled. In May 2025, ESPN announced that it would officially launch an ESPN-branded direct-to-consumer product later that year, which will incorporate ESPN's main channels and content from ESPN+, and become the main streaming offering for all ESPN subscribers.

The Documentary Empire

Alongside its live sports broadcasts, ESPN also airs a variety of sports highlight, talk, and documentary-styled shows. These include Around the Horn, a competitive debating between four sports writers across the country, and College GameDay, a weekly college basketball show airing from the Saturday Primetime game of the week site. The network also produces College GameDay for football, a weekly college football preview show airing from the site of a major college football game, and E:60, an investigative newsmagazine program focusing on American and international sports. First Take, a daily morning talk show with Stephen A. Smith and Molly Qerim, moved from ESPN2 on the 3rd of January 2017, while Get Up! is a daily morning show, focusing on the previous night's game results and the burning sports issues of the day. Monday Night Countdown is a weekly recap show aired on Monday evenings during the NFL season, also serving as the pre-game show for Monday Night Football. Pardon the Interruption is a daily afternoon talk show where Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon debate an array of sports topics, and The Pat McAfee Show is a daily afternoon talk show with news, opinion, and analysis. Many of ESPN's documentary programs such as 30 for 30 and Nine for IX are produced by ESPN Films, a film division created in March 2008 as a restructuring of ESPN Original Entertainment, a programming division that was originally formed in 2001. 30 for 30 started airing in 2009 and continues airing to this day. Each episode is through the eyes of a well known filmmaker and has featured some of the biggest directors in Hollywood. The 30 for 30 film O.J.: Made in America won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2017, the first such Oscar for ESPN. Ultimate Fighting Championship signed a five-year contract with ESPN starting 2019 on ESPN and ESPN+ which estimate every quarter 2 event on UFC on ESPN and 6 events on UFC Fight Night on ESPN+. In March 2019, ESPN announced a new betting-themed daily program, Daily Wager, hosted by the network's gambling analyst Doug Kezirian. The program was ESPN's first regularly scheduled program solely dedicated to gaming-related content. On the 14th of May 2019, ESPN announced a deal with casino operator Caesars Entertainment to establish an ESPN-branded studio at The LINQ Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas to produce betting-themed content. In order to help offset the impact of COVID-19 on its business, Walt Disney CEO Bob Chapek indicated during a fourth-quarter fiscal year 2021 earnings conference that the company would increase its presence in online sports betting, including in partnership with third parties. In 2023, The Pat McAfee Show moved to ESPN as part of a five-year, $85 million deal. The show replaced the Noon ET airing of SportsCenter and This Just In with Max Kellerman.

The Controversial Giant

ESPN has been criticized for focusing too much on men's college and professional sports, particularly the NBA and NFL, and very little on women's sports or extreme sports. Baseball, ice hockey, and soccer fans have also criticized ESPN for not giving their respective sports more coverage. Other criticism has focused on ethnicity in ESPN's varying mediated forms, as well as carriage fees and issues regarding the exportation of ESPN content. Some critics argue that ESPN's success is their ability to provide other enterprise and investigative sports news while competing with other hard sports-news-producing outlets such as Yahoo! Sports and Fox Sports. Some scholars have challenged ESPN's journalistic integrity, calling for an expanded standard of professionalism to prevent biased coverage and conflicts of interest. On the 8th of October 2019, Deadspin reported that an internal memo was sent to ESPN employees instructing them to avoid any political discussions regarding the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong in the aftermath of a tweet by Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey. ESPN has won 232 Sports Emmy Awards in 35 years of eligibility. In 2024, ESPN apologized for submitting fake names for Sports Emmy award consideration over many years, and returned 37 trophies that had been awarded to ineligible recipients to the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The network has also faced challenges in its international expansion, operating regional channels in Africa, Australia, Latin America and the Netherlands. In Canada, it owns a 20% interest in The Sports Network and its five sister networks. Despite the network's success, criticism of ESPN includes accusations of biased coverage. James Pitaro has been chairman since the 5th of March 2018, following the resignation of John Skipper on the 18th of December 2017. ESPN is available to approximately 70 million pay television households in the United States, down from its 2011 peak of 100 million households. The network broadcasts primarily from studio facilities located in Bristol, Connecticut, and also operates offices and auxiliary studios in Miami, Orlando, New York City, Las Vegas, Seattle, Charlotte, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. ESPN's parent company, ESPN Inc., is a joint venture of the Walt Disney Company, which holds 72% and operational control, Hearst Communications with 18%, and the National Football League with 10%.