Country United States Headquarters Kansas City, Missouri | Language English Owned by Charter Communications | |
 | ||
Launched December 12, 1996 (1996-12-12) Picture format 1080i (HDTV)
480i (SDTV) Broadcast area Kansas City metropolitan area
Lincoln, Nebraska | ||
Spectrum Sports is an American regional sports cable and satellite television network that is owned by Charter Communications through its acquisition of Time Warner Cable in May 2016. The channel mainly serves the Kansas City metropolitan area; Lawrence, Kansas; and the state of Nebraska. In addition to being carried on Time Warner Cable, it is currently available on cable providers such as Comcast and WOW! in metropolitan Kansas City, Lawrence, and areas of Nebraska. As of March 31, 2011, it was available in approximately 500,000 households.
Contents
Background
The channel was launched on December 12, 1996 as Metro Sports. It has produced live sporting events for collegiate athletic conferences such as the Big 12 Conference, Missouri Valley Conference, the Summit League, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) and their individual members. TWC SportsChannel's other hallmark programming is its coverage of local Kansas City high school athletics, including its "HyVee High School Game of The Week" featuring top local teams in football, basketball, wrestling, volleyball, baseball, soccer and other sports.
Metro Sports also broadcast five games of the Missouri Mavericks of the Central Hockey League during the 2010-2011 Central Hockey League season. In March 2009, Metro Sports produced and televised live all 31 games of the 2009 NAIA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament, which was held in Kansas City, Missouri.
Metro Sports formerly produced live sporting events for professional sports teams such as Major League Soccer's Kansas City Wizards (including a Spanish language audio simulcast transmitted over a secondary audio program channel during its final two seasons of coverage, before the Wizards declined to renew their broadcasting contract), and the Kansas City Brigade of the Arena Football League, before the league was liquidated and reincarnated. Metro Sports also produced and televised Kansas City Royals games from 2003 to 2007, after which it lost the rights to FSN Midwest.
Metro Sports has published a book, More Than The Score: Kansas City Sports Memories. On March 1, 2010, Metro Sports launched Metro Sports HD, a high definition simulcast feed of Metro Sports, and a secondary channel, Metro Sports 2. In September 2013, the channel was renamed as the Time Warner Cable SportsChannel, with its spin-off channel becoming known as Time Warner Cable SportsChannel 2.
The channel's weekly fantasy football program Fantasy Huddle is also distributed to other Time Warner Cable systems nationwide.
Programming
On June 26, 2013, KU Athletics, IMG College and Time Warner Cable Sports announced that TWC would broadcast live coverage of the University of Kansas events. This includes the football, men's basketball, women's basketball, volleyball, baseball, softball, soccer and the track and field events.