Innovations
For the longest time, the one thing that was not really covered that much on television was sports. While there were many different regions that could see their own team play once a week in basketball, baseball and hockey, there was never really a large amount of sports coverage or a sports specialty channel that really got everything done until channels like ESPN in the United States and RSN in Canada came along. There are a number of different reasons why this has been historically so, but the main innovation behind sports TV is in the creation of popular specialty channels that would offer sports all of the time.
Importance
Sports have always been one of the most popular if not the most popular thing to watch on television. For as long as sports have existed in terms of being televised live or recorded, people have been watching it. The love affair that many parts of the world have with their sports icons is exactly the type of relationship that breeds good profit for a company and this is primarily why sports channels tend to crop up in very quick succession in today's world. They tend to be very profitable and that is why they stick around. Even a game like poker can be followed very closely by a large audience and that is why broadcasting poker on a sports channel is a profitable thing to do.
Usage
The great thing about the idea of sports TV is that it is very much a populist idea. When you think of the reasons that people have been involved with sports TV over the years, invariably it comes right down to the idea that sports TV is something that people enjoy watching. Just as political junkies love the 24 hour news networks (at least while they were broadcasting real political news), sports junkies love being able to turn on the sports channel and watch a sporting event. It is great trade-off; the populace gets their sports needs catered to and the companies that provide the sporting channels get to make a lot of money in the process.
History
The first really successful sports TV channel was ESPN in the United States and now that ESPN has been so successful, there are now dozens of different ESPN channels and spin-offs in the United States and other countries. As more sports start making broadcasting agreements, expect the number of sports TV channels to continue growing.
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