History
"The Deuce" launched on October 1, 1993 at 7:30 p.m. ET with the first edition of its sports news program SportsNight, originally hosted by Keith Olbermann and Suzy Kolber—where Olbermann opened the show by jokingly quipping, "Welcome to the end of my career." Launching with an estimated carriage of about 10 million homes, ESPN2 aimed to be a more informal and youth-oriented channel than ESPN, with a heavier emphasis on programming that would appeal to this demographic. Its initial lineup featured studio programs such as SportsNight (which host Keith Olbermann characterized as a "lighter" parallel to ESPN's SportsCenter that would still be "comprehensive, thorough and extremely skeptical."), Talk2 (a nightly talk show hosted by radio personality Jim Rome, which was billed as being the Larry King Live for sports), Max Out (an extreme sports anthology carried over from ESPN), and SportsSmash, a 5-minute rundown of sports news and scores which aired every half hour. Event coverage would focus on coverage of conventional sports popular within the demographic (such as auto racing, college basketball, and NHL hockey), while also covering atypical sports such as BMX and other extreme sports.
ESPN2 would also be used for experimental broadcasts and technology. On September 18, 1994, ESPN2 aired a simulcast of ESPN's coverage of CART's Bosch Spark Plug Grand Prix, using only onboard camera feeds. In 1995, ESPN2 introduced the "BottomLine", a persistent news ticker which displayed sports news and scores.
ESPN2 also featured several half-hour news programs focused on specific sports, such as NFL 2Night (football), NHL 2Night (hockey), and RPM 2Night (auto racing).
In the late 1990s, ESPN2 would phase out its youth-oriented format and begin to serve as a secondary outlet for ESPN's mainstream programming. The "graffiti 2" logo was dropped in 2001 and replaced with a variant of ESPN's normal logo, and telecasts began to use a more traditional style. However, on-screen graphics (such as the BottomLine) would use a blue color scheme instead of red to differentiate it from ESPN. On February 12, 2007, the use of ESPN2 branding would also be dramatically reduced—while the ESPN2 name would be retained for branding and identification purposes, in-game graphics and other elements began to simply use the normal ESPN logo.
Read more about this topic: ESPN2
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