CBS Cable - As A CBS Division Name

As A CBS Division Name

The CBS Cable name was used for three years as the name of the network's cable division, after the 1996 purchase of The Nashville Network (now Spike) and Country Music Television from Gaylord Entertainment, along with CBS' existing stakes in the regional sports networks Midwest Sports Channel in the Twin Cities/Milwaukee (now split into Fox Sports North, serving Minnesota and the Dakotas, and Fox Sports Wisconsin for Wisconsin, purchased in 1992 by CBS as part of their acquisition of Midwest Television, the owners of WCCO-TV and Green Bay's WFRV-TV) and the Home Team Sports networks in the Baltimore/Washington and Dallas/Ft. Worth areas (now Comcast SportsNet Mid-Atlantic and Fox Sports Southwest, respectively). TNN and CMT were folded into MTV Networks after the 1999 merger with Viacom, with the sports networks sold to other parties shortly after the merger. In 2005, as a result of the split-up of CBS and Viacom, Showtime Networks (Showtime, Flix, and The Movie Channel), and CBS College Sports Network (formerly College Sports Television, or CSTV) became a part of the newly formed CBS Corporation. Showtime Networks would later launch the Smithsonian Channel in 2007.

CBS also made another effort to launch a cable network using the CBS name, CBS Eye On People, which launched in 1997, featuring mostly biography programming and programs from the CBS News archives, along with old episodes of 60 Minutes and other CBS newsmagazines. However the effort proved to be unsuccessful, and in 1998 CBS sold its stake in the network to Discovery Communications, which rebranded it as Discovery People temporarily.