Ventura County Star, Calif. Jim Carlisle column

Source: Ventura County Star, Calif.迷你倉出租Aug. 15--The two most amazing things about the launch of Fox Sports 1 really have nothing to do with the games it will show or the on-camera talent it has hired.The first amazing thing is that three days before the Saturday debut, Fox has signed up virtually every major TV provider to carry the network. It made deals Wednesday with Time Warner Cable, DirecTV, Dish Network and Bright House Networks.In this age of distributors holding out and decrying the exorbitant fees charged by TV networks to the point where even a mainstream network like CBS can get yanked off the air by Time Warner Cable, Fox Sports 1's ability to make deals with every carrier before its first telecast is nothing short of remarkable.Fox Sports 1 will, as it originally promised, be available in about 90 million homes from its start at 3 a.m. PDT Saturday. That should easily make it the most successful network launch in cable TV history, a designation previously held by MLB Network's 50 million homes in 2009 (it has 71 million now; ESPN is available in 98 million).The second amazing thing is something you likely didn't even know about: There will also be a Fox Sports 2 starting up Saturday.During all the rush to get FS1 on the air, not only with talent and scheduling but also distributor negotiations, Fox apparently decided to stay hush-hush on the launch of Fox Sports 2 until everything was squared away. FS2 will complement FS1 much the way ESPN2 does ESPN.Fox Sports 1 replaces the Speed network (with a lot of its programming shifting over). FS2 takes the place of Fuel TV. In most cases, the new networks will appear on the channels of the old ones.What will you see on Fox Sports 1? Well, as far as live sports are concerned at the start, mostly NASCAR practice sessions ("NASCAR Live" starts at 5 a.m., followed by Sprint Cup practice at 5:30), UFC mixed martial arts and soccer. But there will also be some college football and basketball (who doesn't have those these days?) and, starting next season, major league baseball.The NASCAR comes from Speed and the soccer will come from the Fox Soccer channel, which will close down in September and become FXX, an entertainment network.The bulk of Fox Sports 1's "personality" will come from its non-event programming. The netw儲存倉rk's flagship show will be "Fox Sports Live," a three-hour nightly news and opinion show, generally airing at 8 p.m. It will be hosted by Jay Onrait and Dan O'Toole (former anchors on TSN's "SportsCentre" in Canada) and Charissa Thompson, with analysts Donovan McNabb, Ephraim Salaam, Gary Payton and Andy Roddick."Fox Sports Live" will also be carried many nights on Fox Sports West and/or Prime Ticket.Perhaps the most talked about show from FS1 is "Crowd Goes Wild," which will be hosted by Regis Philbin, who will turn 82 on Aug. 25. He'll be joined by cohorts Jason Gay, Michael Kosta, Trevor Pryce, Georgie Thompson and Katie Nolan. The live-audience show will look at the day's top sports news in a "free-flowing and spontaneous" way."Fox Football Daily" follows, promising to be an extension of the "Fox NFL Sunday" pregame show. Featured on the show with host Curt Menefee will be Jay Glazer, Mike Pereira, Ronde Barber, Randy Moss and Brian Urlacher, along with analysts Joel Klatt and Rio Mesa High graduate and former NFL linebacker Scott Fujita."Fox Soccer Daily" is on at 1 p.m. each day, hosted by Julie Stewart-Binks with analysis from Westlake High graduate and former U.S. great Eric Wynalda, Warren Barton, Brian McBride and Grant Wahl.FS1's first college football game is Thursday, Aug. 29 (Utah State-Utah), with a two-hour pregame show hosted by Erin Andrews with Eddie George, Joel Klatt, Petros Papadakis, Mike Pereira and Clay Travis. Gus Johnson and Charles Davis will announce the game.Fox has informally billed FS1 as the "fun alternative" to ESPN with Onrait and O'Toole's irreverent style of presenting highlights leading the way. There certainly is a place for that in sports TV; Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann showed that on ESPN in the '90s. It'll be interesting to see how the network handles controversial stories like steroids or tragedies like the Penn State scandal.Will Fox Sports 1 topple ESPN? Of course not, and it shouldn't try. But pouring a lot of money into talent and having a potentially huge audience will certainly give Fox a chance to make a sizable dent in ratings and advertising.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 Ventura County Star (Camarillo, Calif.) Visit Ventura County Star (Camarillo, Calif.) at .vcstar.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉沙田