TSN Plays Of The Week

Licensed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) on April 2, 1984, as the Action Canada Sports Network,the channel was launched by the Labatt Brewing Company on September 1 of the same year as The Sports Network, or TSN. The network was founded under the leadership of Gordon Craig, a former employee of CBC Sports; alongside coverage of the then co-owned[5] Toronto Blue Jays, TSN also reached a deal with ESPN (itself only 5 years old) shortly before launch to provide additional programs. Although reaching around 400,000 subscribers, TSN's early years were hindered by its initial status as a premium service, bundled in a high-cost package with movie channels such as First Choice and Superchannel, alongside competition with free-to-air sports broadcasts by CBC Television among others.

To improve the prominence of the network, TSN sought to obtain the national cable rights to the National Hockey League—rights that, according to the league, were not sold under the current arrangement with CBC. However, the task was complicated by claims by CBC that it owned the cable rights to the NHL, along with the involvement of competing beer company Molson in Canadian NHL rights at the time. With the help of a Molson employee who was a friend of Gordon, a deal was reached between TSN, Molson, and the NHL to allow the network to broadcast games on cable.

By December 1987, TSN had reached one million subscribers, but the network's staff sought wider distribution for the channel as part of basic cable service; the CRTC approved the network's request for permission to allow TSN to be carried as part of a basic cable lineup. Mike Day, producer of TSN's daily sports news program SportsDesk lamented about the shift to basic cable and the larger audience it would bring, commenting that "one night you're doing a news show that potentially has an audience of one million people, and the next day the potential is five million people."In 1991, TSN acquired rights to the IIHF World U20 Championship, otherwise known as the "World Juniors", which were previously broadcast by CBC. TSN's coverage, along with the recent "Punch-up in Piestany" incident and a strong performance by Canada at the tournament in the mid-1990s, helped to significantly heighten the profile of the tournament in the country (even more so than in other participating countries), to the point that it is, alongside U.S. college football bowl games, regarded as a traditional sporting event of the holiday season in Canada.

Due to CRTC regulations on the foreign ownership of broadcasters, Labatt was forced to sell TSN and RDS upon its acquisition by Interbrew in 1995. Labatt's broadcasting assets were sold to a privately held consortium named NetStar Communications, the investors of which included a number of Canadian firms as well as ESPN Inc., which held an interest of about 30 percent. The same CRTC regulations prevented ESPN from establishing its own separate Canadian sports network outright, so acquiring a minority stake in TSN became ESPN's alternative plan to get into the Canadian market. The Sports Network launched its website TSN.ca on October 1, 1995.

In 1997, the CRTC began permitting TSN to offer an "alternate feed", which could be used to provide a regional opt-out of the main TSN service for programming that must be blacked out in the rest of the country. Alternate programming could make up a maximum of 10% of the TSN schedule—an average of 2.4 hours a day.
In 2000, after ESPN blocked two attempts by the Canadian partners to sell NetStar to Canwest, CTV Inc. acquired the Canadian partners' shares. CTV Inc. was acquired by Bell Canada and The Woodbridge Company (publisher of The Globe and Mail newspaper) as part of the joint venture Bell Globemedia in 2001. As a result of its purchase of TSN, CTV would be forced to sell its regional sports network CTV Sportsnet, eventually selling it to minority shareholder Rogers Media. Following the acquisition, TSN would move its operations to CTV's Agincourt complex in the Toronto district of Scarborough.This oddity would become an inside joke between personalities on both networks, who commonly referred to jumping between the two networks as "crossing the parking lot.
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