ESPN

Background and launch Bill Rasmussen came up with the concept of ESPN in May 1978, after he was fired from his job with the World Hockey Association's New England Whalers. Rasmussen and his ESPN co-founder Ed Eagan, joined by Rasmussen's son Scott (who had also been let go by the Whalers), first rented office space in Plainville, Connecticut. However, the plan to base ESPN there was put on hold because of a local ordinance prohibiting buildings from bearing rooftop satellite dishes. Available land to build their own facility was quickly found in Bristol, Connecticut (where the channel remains headquartered), with funding to buy the property provided by Getty Oil, which purchased 85% of the company from Bill Rasmussen on February 22, 1979, in an attempt to diversify the company's holdings. This helped the credibility of the fledgling company; however, there were still many doubters about the viability of their sports channel concept. Another event that helped build ESPN's credibility was securing an advertising agreement with Anheuser-Busch in the spring of 1979; the company invested $1 million to be the "exclusive beer advertised on the network". ESPN launched on September 7, 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; he would continue to be an on-air fixture for decades. In April 2026, ESPN premiered a documentary, Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN, about the network's founding. The documentary tells the story of how Bill Rasmussen and Scott Rasmussen launched the network. 1980s to 2000s 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. It first aired its games in March 1980, helping bring attention to what is today known as "March Madness". 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. During this period, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) purchased 100% of ESPN from the Rasmussens and Getty Oil. 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. Later that year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma (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 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). 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. 2000s Challenges began to appear in the 2000s. 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 April 26, 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 April 12, 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. 2020s On August 8, 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 February 6, 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. On August 5, 2025, ESPN announced that it had reached an agreement to acquire the National Football League's NFL Media division, pending regulatory approval. Under the deal, ESPN would get control of the NFL's in-house media properties such as NFL Network, NFL RedZone, and the league's official fantasy football service. The NFL would take a 10% equity stake in ESPN, NFL Network and RedZone would become part of the forthcoming ESPN streaming service, the NFL would license content from NFL Films to air on ESPN networks, and ESPN will reassign selected games from its NFL broadcast package to NFL Network's exclusive game package. The NFL would continue to produce RedZone for ESPN, and the acquisition excludes properties such as NFL Films and NFL+. Regulatory approval was granted in January 2026, with the deal closing on the 31st of that month; NFL Media employees would join ESPN in April of that year. On August 6, 2025, ESPN announced that it had agreed to a five-year deal with WWE to stream WWE live premium events on the forthcoming ESPN streaming service, as well as simulcast select events on ESPN linear channels, starting with Wrestlepalooza in September 2025. ==Programming==