ESPN Australia


ESPN Australia is a 24-hour sports channel offered in Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands and Papua New Guinea.
Initially, ESPN was known as Sports ESPN on the Optus Vision cable television system, and focused on sports aired by its home network in the United States, including American football, baseball, and basketball. In order to expand its local reach, it has shown an increasing number of football games including FA Cup, World Cup qualifying games and Major League Soccer. Also on the network schedule are rugby matches, among other sports.
ESPN Australia has also commenced showing locally produced content including Australian versions of PTI and SportsCenter. They also air a soccer discussion show Monday to Friday called ESPNsoccernet PressPass which is hosted by Andrew Orsatti.
On 1 March 2011, ESPN2 launched in Australia both in standard and high definition formats.

History

It became available on Austar in April 1999, and Foxtel in September 2002.
The broadcast of Jarryd Hayne's debut for the San Francisco 49ers in the National Football League on 15 September 2015 drew the network's highest ever audience with 116,000 viewers watching the game live, beating the previous audience record of 107,100 viewers for Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014.

Content

The following is the list of sports programming shown on the ESPN network.

Athletics

ESPN HD was one of the first five channels to be available in HD when Foxtel HD+ launched. ESPN HD commenced in June 2008. The SD version of ESPN began broadcasting in widescreen on 25 January 2010.
On 2 June 2011 ESPN HD and ESPN3.com launched in New Zealand on Sky.

ESPN 3D

ESPN 3D launched in Australia on 30 July 2010. The channel launched to show 8 hours of the X Games 16 live in 3D.
Foxtel 3D launched on 1 November 2010 which shows all of ESPN 3D's content - with ESPN 3D no longer having its own channel. ESPN 3D was shut down on 30 September 2013, citing "limited viewer adoption of 3D services".