ESPN2
ESPN2 is an American multinational pay television network that is owned by ESPN Inc., a joint venture between The Walt Disney Company and the Hearst Communications.
ESPN2 was initially formatted as a younger-skewing counterpart to its parent network ESPN, with a focus on sports popular among young adult audiences, and carrying a more informal and youthful presentation than the main network. By the late 1990s, this mandate was phased out, as the channel increasingly became a second outlet for ESPN's mainstream sports coverage.
As of September 2018, ESPN2 is available to approximately 86 million television households in the United States.
History
ESPN2 launched on October 1, 1993 at 7:30 p.m. ET. Its inaugural program was the premiere of SportsNight, a sports news program originally hosted by Keith Olbermann and Suzy Kolber; Olbermann opened the show by jokingly welcoming viewers to "the end of our careers." Launching with an estimated carriage of about 10 million homes, and nicknamed "The Deuce", ESPN2 aimed to be a more informal and youth-oriented channel than parent network ESPN, featuring a heavier emphasis on programming that would appeal to the demographic. The youthful image was also reflected in its overall presentation, which featured a graffiti-themed logo and on-air graphics.Its initial lineup featured studio programs such as SportsNight—which host Keith Olbermann characterized as a "lighter" parallel to ESPN's SportsCenter that would still be "comprehensive, thorough and extremely skeptical", Talk2—a Jim Rome-hosted nightly talk show billed as an equivalent to CNN's Larry King Live, Max Out—an extreme sports anthology series carried over from ESPN, and SportsSmash—a five-minute recap of sports headlines which aired every half-hour. ESPN2 also featured several half-hour news programs focused on specific sports, such as NFL 2Night, NHL 2Night and RPM 2Night. Event coverage would focus on coverage of mainstream sports popular within the 18–34 age demographic, such as auto racing, college basketball and NHL hockey, while also covering atypical sports such as BMX and other extreme sports.
ESPN2 would also be used to showcase new technology and experimental means of broadcasting events: on September 18, 1994, ESPN2 simulcast CART's Bosch Spark Plug Grand Prix using only onboard camera feeds. In 1995, ESPN2 introduced the "BottomLine", a persistent news ticker which displayed sports news and scores. The BottomLine would later be adopted by ESPN itself and all of its future properties.
In the late 1990s, ESPN2 began to phase out its youth-oriented format, and transitioned to becoming a secondary outlet for ESPN's mainstream sports programming; telecasts began to adopt a more conventional style, and the "graffiti 2" logo was dropped in 2001 in favor of a variation of the standard ESPN logo. On-screen graphics used a blue color scheme instead of red to differentiate it from ESPN. On February 12, 2007, the ESPN2 branding was stripped from most on-air presentation and replaced with ESPN: the ESPN2 brand is now solely used for station identification.
Programming
Sports events presented on ESPN2 originally tended to be alternative sports such as poker, billiards, lumberjacking, extreme sports and, more recently, drum and bugle corps. However, in recent years ESPN2 has broadcast increasingly more mainstream sporting events, including Major League Baseball games, the East–West Shrine Game, much of the 2006 World Baseball Classic, many Major League Soccer games, NCAA football games, NCAA basketball games, the WNBA, the Arena Football League, regular season KHL games, and Saturday afternoon NASCAR Nationwide Series races. In 2011, ESPN2 also acquired broadcast rights to delayed coverage for some American Le Mans Series events, with series' major events airing on ABC.The channel has also become ESPN's home for tennis coverage. The showpieces are all four of the "Grand Slam" tournaments: the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open. U.S.-based tournaments, including the ATP Masters 1000 events at Indian Wells and Miami, as well as the US Open Series, are also broadcast on the channel.
Most of ESPN's soccer output has been broadcast on ESPN2, including Major League Soccer, Premier League and La Liga matches; the channel also broadcast the United States' FIFA World Cup qualifiers in 2009. ESPN2 formerly broadcast matches of the UEFA Champions League, until rights for that tournament moved to Fox Soccer and its sister networks. In 2003, ESPN2 began broadcasting Major League Lacrosse games. In March 2007, ESPN2 and the league agreed on a new broadcast contract that ran until the 2016 season.
On 4 October 2017, ESPN announced that it had acquired rights to the Formula One World Championship; the majority of the races are carried by ESPN2.
ESPN2's former flagship show, the morning sports/entertainment program Cold Pizza, achieved minimal success and saw several format and host changes. In January 2006, it was supplanted by the television simulcast of ESPN Radio's Mike and Mike in the Morning and moved to a later time slot. In May 2007, Cold Pizza moved from New York City to the ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut and was renamed ESPN First Take. After ESPN became part of a new broadcast contract with the association, ESPN2 also premiered the new daily show NASCAR Now in February 2007. Quite Frankly with Stephen A. Smith, a program that featured interviews with popular sports figures, had averaged extremely low ratings, and had also faced several timeslot changes, until it was finally canceled in January 2007.
On August 8, 2018, ESPN2 stunted as "ESPN8: The Ocho"—an homage to a fictitious eighth ESPN channel portrayed in the 2004 film , dedicated to unconventional and obscure sporting events. The event—which also included airings of the original film— was a follow-up to a similar marathon aired by ESPNU the previous year.
Simulcasting
ESPN2 has also simulcast many game telecasts with ESPN, usually as a part of a "Full Circle" or "Megacast" broadcast, which covers a single telecast across several ESPN networks, with each network providing a different form of coverage. ESPN2 also simulcasts some programming from ESPNews, often during local blackouts of scheduled national game telecasts, and for a while provided a simulcast of ESPN Deportes' edition of SportsCenter on Sundays. In return, ESPN2 programming is often seen on ESPN during blackouts of games in certain markets.ESPN2 also often carries SportsCenter at times when the broadcast on ESPN is delayed by a sporting event that overruns into one of the program's scheduled timeslots. ESPN and ESPN2 also jointly aired two episodes of a documentary special called This is SportsCenter, in which ESPN showed a documentary showing the production of an edition of SportsCenter, while the finished product aired on ESPN2. The documentary would usually air for two hours, where the first hour would cover the preliminary production of the night's show on ESPN, while ESPN2 aired ESPN's regular programming. The second hour usually spent time at production control while covering reaction to the night's developments.
Both ESPN and ESPN2 carried ABC News' coverage of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon on September 11, 2001. ESPN2 also aired the 2008 SEC Men's Basketball Tournament championship game in 2008 to most of the nation, since a storm damaged the original game site, the Georgia Dome, causing the schedule to be rearranged and site to be moved to the smaller Alexander Memorial Coliseum. The new schedule was in conflict with CBS's coverage of the Big Ten Championship Game; the game was produced by CBS. In the territory of the Southeastern Conference, the Big Ten game aired on ESPN2.
ESPN2 has occasionally been used to carry simulcasts of ESPN Deportes' Spanish-language coverage of events, in an effort to boost availability of the Spanish broadcast and promote the ESPN Deportes channel, and reduce the need to counterprogram with lesser-viewed programs. Examples since 2016 have included NBA Christmas Day games, the 2017 World Baseball Classic, and an International Champions Cup game between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. Since the 2017 NFL season, ESPN2 has simulcast ESPN Deportes' Spanish-language Monday Night Football during the first nine weeks of the season, including its pre-game show NFL Esta Noche, and ESPN Latin America's SportsCenter from Mexico City. ESPN2 had largely scheduled filler programming against MNF until the start of its Monday-night college basketball coverage in November.