Comcast/Charter Sports Southeast

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Comcast Sports Southeast
Charter Sports Southeast
Comcast SportsNet
NBC Sports
History
LaunchedSeptember 3, 1999; 24 years ago (1999-09-03)[1]
ClosedJune 1, 2014; 9 years ago (2014-06-01)
Former namesSun Belt Network

Comcast Sports Southeast and Charter Sports Southeast (CSS) was an American

Fox Sports South
, CSS had a heavier focus on college sports – with broadcasting partnerships with many of the area's colleges and universities.

The network was carried exclusively on

Comcast SportsNet networks. The channel reached over six million homes in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia
.

Programming

CSS's main competitors were

Fox Sports Southeast (then known as "SportSouth"). All three networks shared some programming, including college coaches' shows. However, Fox Sports South and SportSouth had ties to most of the South's professional sports teams, and the Southeastern and Atlantic Coast conferences as wholes. CSS, on the other hand, regularly broadcast live sporting events of some of the smaller and less heralded colleges of the region, as well as those of some of the large SEC and ACC schools (for example, college baseball coverage included SEC, ACC, Sun Belt, C-USA, and Atlantic Sun conference games[2]). During football season, CSS produced its own feeds of many of the region's major college games exclusively for tape-delayed
broadcasts, even though the games may have aired live on other networks.

CSS also broadcast the

Arena Football League's Georgia Force, Orlando Predators and Tampa Bay Storm, and some CFL
contests.

Local cable systems were able to pre-empt normal CSS programming in favor of local sporting events, such as

high school football and basketball
games and local collegiate sporting events.

CSS aired a nightly sports talk show titled SportsNite. On most

Comcast SportsNet services, this program was in a newscast format similar to SportsCenter, but on CSS, it more closely resembled a southern-exclusive version of Fox Sports Net's The Best Damn Sports Show Period
.

In March 2008, CSS's owners Comcast and Charter struck separate deals with the

independent station WPCH-TV (channel 17). The broadcasts were available on CSS on Charter and Comcast cable systems throughout Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia (except for Metro Atlanta), and the city of Asheville, North Carolina.[3][4] This deal ended in the 2011 season – due to the operations of WPCH being taken over by Meredith Corporation under a local marketing agreement, production duties for the Braves telecasts were transferred to Fox Sports South, and were instead simulcast on SportSouth outside of Atlanta;[5] on March 1, 2013, Fox Sports South and SportSouth announced the channel struck deals to air 45 more Atlanta Braves games, ending the team's contract with WPCH-TV.[6]

Starting in April 2009, CSS broadcast at least 25

Gwinnett Braves games over the next four seasons.[7]

Shutdown of CSS

It was announced on March 14, 2014 that CSS would shut down on June 1, 2014. The closure of the network followed the loss of its SEC programming (which had generated much of CSS' ratings and revenue) to ESPN's new SEC Network.[8] The final original program that aired on CSS was "Through The Years", a retrospective of the network's 15-year history which first aired on May 23, 2014 and was repeated daily until the network signed off on June 1, 2014.[9]

References

  1. ^ Nicholson, Gilbert (September 6, 1999). "College Sports Nets to Battle". Mediaweek. Archived from the original on March 7, 2016. Retrieved March 16, 2014. (preview of subscription content)
  2. ^ "College Baseball on CSS". Archived from the original on 2009-06-03. Retrieved 2010-03-28.
  3. ^ montgomeryadvertiser.com | Montgomery Advertiser Archived 2014-11-12 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ^ "Citizen Times". Citizen Times. Retrieved 8 April 2018.
  5. Atlanta Journal-Constitution
    . Retrieved January 18, 2011.
  6. ^ Fox Picks Up Braves' Games from PeachTree TV Archived 2013-10-02 at the Wayback Machine Multichannel News, March 1, 2013.
  7. ^ "The Official Site of The Gwinnett Stripers - gostripers.com Homepage". Gwinnett Stripers. Retrieved 8 April 2018.
  8. ^ CSS Sports shutting down June 1 Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 14, 2014
  9. ^ "CSS: Through the Years – TV Series – Moviefone". AOL Moviefone. Retrieved 2017-02-23.

External links