Basketball TV or BTV is a 24-hour all-basketball cable channel in the Philippines owned by the Solar Entertainment Corporation. It was launched on October 1, 2006, rebranding the Sports Plus channel.
The channel focuses more on showing NBA TV related programs and also regular NBA games once the season begins. In its initial broadcasts, it has been showing re-runs of the 2006 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament and the 2006 FIBA World Championship.
Aside for the NBA games, it also shows coverage of the Euroleague and the National Basketball League as well as FIBA related programming and the 2006 Asian Games and 2008 Olympic Games basketball competitions. The 2007 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament was shown on BTV including the championship game, as well as the 2008 tournament.
Aside for its foreign coverage, BTV was the official carrier of the Philippine Basketball League from April 2007 after gaining the rights from Studio 23. However, the coverage is on a slightly delayed basis at 5:00 PM. In late-2007, the second matchup of a Tuesday gameday is shown on RPN 9 but has since moved to IBC-13 on Saturdays at the onset of the season-ending conference because RPN became the exclusive broadcast carrier of C/S. However the PBL was moved back to C/S 9 in November 2008, showing the first game on Tuesday. As of 2010, the PBL is inactive.
It also covered the Collegiate Champions League tournaments, and in the past saw a few National Capital Region Athletic Association and National Basketball Conference matches.
From 2008-2011, the Philippine Basketball Association was also shown on BTV, although on delay and only one game per day, with the live games aired on RPN and later Studio 23.
The channel is available throughout Metro Manila through SkyCable and is also available nationwide via Cignal and G-Sat satellite TV, as well as online via iwantv.com.ph (exclusively available for SkyBroadband and Bayan DSL subscribers).
A supplementary channel, NBA Premium TV, was launched in time for the 2010-11 season, featuring over 400 games with no local commercials. The network is available on both HD and SD formats, and is available as a premium subscription plan with additional fees.
Read more about Basketball TV: Slogans
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)