Sporting Madness

William Houston reported the other day that the long-anticipated CBC Sports Plus digital sports channel not only won't be launching this year, it may not launch at all. Houston cites carriage issues as one of the major problems, which makes sense considering the difficulties TSN ran into trying to get Rogers to carry TSN2 (and TSN2 had much more high-demand programming when it started than CBC Sports Plus was anticipated to have). This is disappointing news for Canadian sports fans as a whole, as more channels tend to mean more sports events are available. However, it may be particularly damaging to CIS fans hoping to see more televised university sports content. I've been following the CBC Sports Plus saga for several years now, and first spoke to CBC Sports head Scott Moore on the subject for a Queen's Journal piece on CIS TV coverage in March 2008 . At that time, he seemed quite optimistic that the CIS might have a plcae on the new channel, commenting, "I thin...

I've been meaning to put this up for a while, but just didn't have the time. A couple weeks ago, I wrote a story for the Journal about two new proposed TV networks the CRTC is looking at. The first application is an initiative of the Canadian Olympic Committee, which wants to launch English and French channels focusing on amateur sports, called the Canadian Amateur Sports Network and Réseau des sports amateur canadiens respectively. The second application is from the CBC for its own sports channel, which would also include an amateur sports component. Scott Moore, the executive director of CBC Sports, told me that their application proposed 35 per cent amateur content. Both applications are currently before the CRTC, and should soon enter the "gazetting" period, where the public and other companies can intervene for or against the new channels. These applications are interesting because they may very well lead to more televised coverage of CIS sports. CIS Director o...