The Sports Network (TSN) is English Canada's leading 24-hour national television broadcaster of sports. TSN's sister station, which broadcasts similar programmes but in French, is Réseau des sports (RDS). TSN premiered in 1984, in the first group of Canadian cable channels. It was designed as a Canadian version of ESPN, the extremely successful American all-sports cable channel.
Today the majority owner of TSN is Bell Globemedia, which also owns the CTV network. ESPN, the American cable channel, also has a share, and TSN's programming and on-air look is now patterned after ESPN's.
TSN's flagship program is SportsCentre (based on ESPN's SportsCenter -- known as SportsDesk until 2001), a highlights and sports news show that airs several times a day.
The network covers dozens of National Hockey League and Canadian Football League games each year, plus a limited schedule of Toronto Blue Jays baseball and Toronto Raptors basketball. It also airs professional wrestling in the form of WWE's flagship show, WWE RAW. Unfortunately for Canadian fans, TSN edits the program for repeats. Only extremely violent scenes (such as heavy beatings or displacement of a large amount of blood) will be censored live. A portion of TSN's programming comes from ESPN, including the latter network's National Football League coverage.
In early 2005, TSN was part of the consortium that won the Canadian broadcast rights to the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, as well as the 2012 Summer Olympics. This was considered a serious coup, as the rival CBC had consistently won Olympic broadcast rights from the 1996 Summer Olympics through to the 2008 Summer Olympics. CTV and TQS will be the primary broadcasters; TSN, RDS and Rogers Sportsnet will provide supplementary coverage.
Many outside of Ontario derisively refer to TSN as the Toronto Sports Network, due to its perceived bias towards Toronto teams. This perception was taken advantage of by the network's rival Sportsnet, which launched 4 regional networks.
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