The Sports Network

• 1. Introduction

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  The Sports Network, known to Canadians simply as TSN, launched on the 1st of September, 1984, the brainchild of the Labatt Brewing Company, as one of the first specialty cable channels in the country. From the start, the network struck a deal with a young ESPN, itself only five years old, to secure programming and give the fledgling channel something to offer its subscribers. That partnership would shape nearly every chapter of TSN's story. How does a premium cable channel that only around 400,000 people could initially receive grow into the largest specialty channel in Canada by gross revenue? And how does a sports broadcaster build an identity when its most prized asset can be taken away overnight?

• 2. Labatt's Gamble

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  Gordon Craig, a former CBC Sports employee, founded TSN and led it through its earliest, most precarious years. The channel was licensed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) on the 2nd of April, 1984, under the original name Action Canada Sports Network. When it launched, TSN was bundled into a high-cost premium package alongside movie channels such as First Choice and Superchannel. That placement put it out of reach for most Canadian households and left the network vulnerable to the free sports coverage already available on CBC Television.

  The fight for NHL cable rights illustrated just how tangled the early landscape was. The league claimed those rights had not been sold under its existing arrangement with CBC, but CBC insisted it owned them. A rival beer company, Molson, was also entangled in Canadian NHL rights at the time. The situation was resolved through an unlikely intermediary: a Molson employee who happened to be a personal friend of Craig helped broker a three-way deal among TSN, Molson, and the NHL that allowed TSN to put games on cable.

  By December 1987, TSN had crossed one million subscribers and pushed successfully for CRTC approval to be carried as part of basic cable service. Mike Day, the producer of TSN's daily sports news program SportsDesk, captured the magnitude of that shift when he described going from a potential nightly audience of one million people to a potential of five million, overnight.

• 3. The World Juniors Effect

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  In 1990, TSN acquired broadcast rights to the IIHF World Junior Championship from CBC, a tournament that was then far from a national obsession. TSN's coverage coincided with the aftermath of the notorious "Punch-up in Piestany" incident and a strong run by Canada at the tournament during the mid-1990s. Together, those elements pushed the World Juniors into the cultural mainstream. The tournament became regarded, alongside American college football bowl games, as one of the traditional sporting events of the Canadian holiday season.

  That reach grew into something institutional. TSN has broadcast the IIHF World Junior Championship annually since 1992, with coverage produced by Paul Graham following a broadcast agreement with Hockey Canada vice-president Bob Nicholson. Initially TSN covered only Team Canada's games, then expanded to all games in Canada's pool, then to every game in the tournament. By the 2021 Championships, every pre-tournament and in-tournament game was broadcast on TSN. TSN also renewed its broader contract with Hockey Canada through the 2033-34 season in 2020, locking in tournaments including the Men's and Women's World Championships and the IIHF World U18 Championship.

• 4. Ownership Shifts and a New Logo

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  CRTC foreign ownership rules forced Labatt's hand when it was acquired by Interbrew in 1995: the brewer had to sell TSN and its French-language counterpart RDS. The assets went to a privately held consortium called NetStar Communications, whose investors included several Canadian firms as well as ESPN Inc., which took an interest of about 30 percent. The same foreign ownership rules that forced the sale also prevented ESPN from launching its own standalone Canadian sports network, making the minority stake in TSN its available path into the Canadian market. TSN launched its website TSN.ca on the 1st of October, 1995.

  In 2000, after ESPN blocked two attempts by the Canadian partners to sell NetStar to Canwest, CTV Inc. stepped in and acquired the Canadian partners' shares. CTV then moved TSN's operations to its Agincourt complex in the Scarborough district of Toronto. The shared parking lot between TSN and CTV became an inside joke among on-air personalities, who described moving between the two networks as "crossing the parking lot."

  The alignment with CTV brought visible changes to TSN's on-air identity. A new logo echoed ESPN's own branding, and TSN's flagship news program SportsDesk was renamed SportsCentre, a Canadian spelling of ESPN's SportsCenter. The CRTC drew a line, however, at TSN adopting the name "ESPN Canada" outright, ruling that it would give the appearance of ESPN holding de facto majority control of the network.

• 5. Bell Takes Control

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  On the 10th of September, 2010, Bell Canada announced plans to acquire 100 percent of CTVglobemedia's broadcasting arm. The financial terms were substantial: Woodbridge Company Limited, Torstar, and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan would together receive $1.3 billion in cash or equity in BCE, while BCE assumed $1.7 billion in debt, for a total transaction value of $3.2 billion. The deal closed on the 1st of April, 2011, after the CRTC approved the sale on the 7th of March. The resulting company became known as Bell Media.

  TSN entered radio broadcasting almost immediately after the deal closed. On the 13th of April, 2011, Bell relaunched Toronto AM station CHUM as the first TSN Radio station. Montreal station CKGM and Winnipeg's CFRW joined the TSN Radio brand on the 5th of October, 2011. Also that year, TSN acquired broadcast rights to the newly returned Winnipeg Jets and established a part-time regional feed, TSN Jets, to carry their games.

  Bell's purchase also drew TSN into the complicated ownership of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment. On the 9th of December, 2011, the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan announced it would sell its majority MLSE stake to Bell Canada and Rogers Communications at 37.5 percent each, in a deal valued at around $1.32 billion. Larry Tanenbaum increased his ownership to a quarter of the company as part of the same transaction. The deal cleared the Competition Bureau and the CRTC in summer 2012, giving Bell partial ownership of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Toronto Raptors and opening new avenues for TSN's regional sports coverage.

• 6. Losing the NHL, Expanding the Channels

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  From 1987 to 1998, and again from 2002 to 2014, TSN held national cable rights to broadcast the NHL in Canada. In November 2013, Rogers Communications announced a 12-year deal to become the sole national television rightsholder of the NHL, beginning in the 2014-15 season. Critics viewed the loss as a significant blow to TSN. TSN personality Bob McKenzie addressed it directly in a series of Twitter posts, explaining that losing national rights was not unprecedented, having also lost them to CTV Sportsnet for a period after that network launched in 1998, and that TSN's goal was to remain "THE source for all things hockey" through analysis programs and regional coverage.

  TSN's response was structural. On the 6th of May, 2014, the network announced three new channels, TSN3, TSN4, and TSN5, originally set to launch in September 2014 to mark the network's 30th anniversary. The launch date was moved forward to the 25th of August, 2014, to allow multi-court coverage of the 2014 US Open tennis tournament. TSN president Stewart Johnston described the expansion as an "important evolution" that would let TSN broadcast a larger volume of live events simultaneously, particularly for Grand Slam tennis, curling, and NCAA basketball. Dave Krikst launched BarDown on TSN's YouTube page at the same time, a segment built around hockey-focused quizzes and beer league content aimed at a younger audience, assembled from TSN producers including Jesse Pollock, Corwin McCallum, Daniel Zakrzewski, and Luca Celebre.

  The new feeds organized TSN's coverage regionally. TSN3 serves Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and northwestern Ontario and carries Winnipeg Jets regional broadcasts. TSN4 is the primary feed for most of Ontario and carries Toronto Maple Leafs regional games. TSN5 covers eastern Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada and carries Ottawa Senators regional games. TSN2, which launched on the 29th of August, 2008, carries Montreal Canadiens broadcasts and serves as an overflow channel when all four regional feeds carry a simultaneous major event. On the 20th of January, 2016, TSN broadcast its first 4K ultra high-definition telecast, a Toronto Raptors game, followed by a slate of regional NHL games and additional Raptors games in that format.

• 7. Rights Portfolio and Broadcast Firsts

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  TSN was the first pay television channel in the world to broadcast the Olympics, carrying the 1988 Winter Olympics from Calgary. Its relationship with the CFL dates to 1987, and since the 2008 season TSN has been the league's exclusive broadcaster, airing all games including the Grey Cup. In November 2019, TSN and the CFL signed a six-year media rights extension. In 2012, to mark the 100th Grey Cup, TSN produced a documentary anthology called Engraved on a Nation, focusing on the Cup and CFL history, then revived the series in 2019 with a second season covering other major figures in Canadian sports.

  Acquiring the Hockey Theme added an unexpected piece of cultural history to TSN's portfolio. CTV acquired rights to the tune, which had served as the theme for Hockey Night in Canada for 40 years, after CBC declined to renew its rights in June 2008 amid a legal dispute with composer Dolores Claman. A reorchestrated version has been used on TSN and RDS hockey broadcasts since fall 2008.

  On the basketball side, TSN split NBA rights with Sportsnet by virtue of the league's Canadian rights being managed by MLSE, which owns the Toronto Raptors. TSN aired the series-clinching Game 6 of the 2019 NBA Finals, which drew an average of 7.7 million viewers, making it the most-watched NBA telecast in Canadian history. TSN also holds exclusive Canadian rights to all four Grand Slam tennis tournaments, all four golf majors, the Canadian Football League, and the NFL as the exclusive cable rightsholder alongside terrestrial broadcaster CTV, a contract renewed by the NFL in 2022 under a multi-year deal that added exclusive Canadian rights to Thursday Night Football.