History
Fox Sports Florida was launched on July 1, 1987 as SportsChannel Florida by Rainbow Media (owned by Cablevision) becoming the fourth SportsChannel America network. The network originally featured coverage of local college teams. It had contracts to show select games from Florida, Florida State, Miami, South Florida, and Jacksonville.
In addition to national SportsCahnnel programming, it also showed select Yankees, Mets, and White Sox games which were produced by SportsChannel New York and SportsChannel Chicago.
Sarting with the 1988-89 season SportsChannel Florida televised Miami Heat games. In 1992, SportsChannel lost the contract to then rival Sunshine Network. Heat games would return years later when both networks came under the owenrship of Fox.
In 1996 Wayne Huizenga purchased a 70% controlling interest in SportsChannel Florida from Rainbow Media (by this time a joint-venture between Cablevision and NBC). This would lead to SportsChannel gaining rights to Huizenga's Florida Panthers for the 1996-97 season. Huizenga's Florida Marlins would also leave the Sunshine Network in favor of SportsChannel in 1997.
In 1998, SportsChannel Florida gained rights to MLB expansion team Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
Unlike the rest of SportsChannel America, Huizenga's control of SportsChannel Florida prevented it from joining Fox Sports Net in early 1998. Cablevision finally bought back Huizenga's share of the network in 2000. The network was relaunched as Fox Sports Net Florida on March 1, 2000, making it the last SportsChannel Network to do so.
In a 2005 deal involving several other shared assests of Fox and Cablevision (see Fox Sports Networks), Fox gained full ownership of FSN Florida.
Read more about this topic: Fox Sports Florida
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