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...

Things aren't looking too good for Setanta, one of the primary worldwide broadcasters of the English Premier League. According to The Times , the company may go off the air "at any moment" after fellow broadcaster BSkyB declined to provide them with a £50 million [ BBC News ] loan in exchange for access to their live EPL rights. They've also apparently suspended new subscriptions [ Ireland Online , found via Brian Zygo ]. Founders Leonard Ryan and Michael O'Rourke are reportedly trying to find a new source of financing, but that isn't easy these days. This could have profound implications for soccer across the globe. Some of the most drastic effects will likely take place in the Scottish Premier League. Check out this passage from the Times article: "The worst effects of a Setanta collapse, though, would be felt in Scotland. Payments currently due to the individual SPL clubs range in size from £70,000 to nearly £750,000, with the Old Firm obviously ...

Two stories on the Globe and Mail 's website only hours apart give rather different takes on this year's Grey Cup viewership. The headline for the story from The Canadian Press is "Cup audience increases five per cent", while the headline for William Houston 's column is "Small audience tunes in to Grey Cup Game" (game really shouldn't be capitalized, but so be it). The ledes are also rather different, as shown below: CP: "An average of 3.65 million people tuned in to watch the first-ever Grey Cup broadcast on TSN and RDS on Sunday, according to numbers released by the network. The total audience for Calgary's win over Montreal in the 96th Grey Cup represented a five per cent increase over the viewership for last year's game, which Saskatchewan won over Winnipeg. That game was aired on CBC." Houston: "TSN's first Grey Cup telecast drew one of the lowest television audiences in the history of the CFL championship game. Th...

(Dave Pratt conducting his radio show: photo from the TEAM 1040 website ). A few new things in the Dave Pratt case , which continues to get worse and worse. A quick recap: Pratt, a prominent Vancouver sports personality who wrote for the Vancouver Province and currently still hosts a drive-time radio show on the TEAM 1040 which is partially simulcast on Rogers Sportsnet Pacific, lost his job Wednesday after a reader e-mailed the newspaper to let them know that Pratt basically cut and pasted an entire 2000 piece in Sports Illustrated by Rick Reilly. You can find my original post on the case here and the second one here . Now, the new developments. First, in a CBC story earlier today , Pratt described the plagiarism as a "minor gaffe". "It was a Saturday and I wanted to get out of [the office] before noon," he told CBC over the phone. That is absolutely inexcusable. If he's serious about apologizing, why does he call it a "minor gaffe"? That quote loo...

(Photo from (gasp) AveryNation . Makes me question who I hate more, Crosby or Avery. I think Avery wins by a nose, due to the Vogue internship and the whole Elisha Cuthbert thing, but Crosby's pretty close). I don't want to make it seem like I'm always ragging on the Globe and Mail's William Houston, but his column today annoyed the hell out of me. Here's the highlights (lowlights?). "Let's see. He's the youngest player to be appointed as the captain of an NHL team. This is his first Stanley Cup final. Hard to tell, but he may still be hurting from an ankle injury that sidelined him for 29 games in the regular season. On Wednesday, Sidney Crosby scored two of the Pittsburgh Penguins' three goals and logged almost 20 minutes of ice time to lead the Penguins back into their series against the Detroit Red Wings. It was a terrific performance. But guess who received the attention during the Hockey Night in Canada postgame coverage? Gary Roberts. The s...

I should preface this by stating that I respect the Globe and Mail's William Houston as a writer who's been doing a tough job for a long time, and I frequently read his columns. He does a fantastic job as a reporter who digs up interesting details on media coverage of Canadian sports, and his takes on the competition among the various channels and the TV ratings of different events are always worth a look. However, his analysis of networks' on-air coverage is much more hit-and-miss. Some of it is bang-on, such as his analysis of the different networks' trade deadline shows. I don't agree with many of his other ideas, particularly about what makes good and bad commentary, but I can usually at least understand where he's coming from. On occasion though, he'll drop in something that's so absurdly out-of-the-blue that I can't even begin to fathom the thought process he went through in constructing it. A great example of the latter is his column from ye...

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...