15 Facts About ESPN2

ESPN2 is an American multinational pay television network owned by ESPN Inc, a joint venture between The Walt Disney Company and Hearst Communications.

ESPN2 was initially formatted as a younger-skewing counterpart to its parent network ESPN, with a focus on sports popular among young adult audiences, and carrying a more informal and youthful presentation than the main network.

ESPN2 carried several half-hour studio programs focused on specific sports, such as NFL 2Night, NHL 2Night, and RPM 2Night.

ESPN2 would be used to showcase new technology and experimental means of broadcasting events: on September 18,1994, ESPN2 simulcast 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.

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On February 12,2007, ESPN2's unique branding elements were stripped from most on-air presentation: the ESPN2 brand is solely used for station identification, and is no longer used as part of the branding of its programming.

Sports events presented on ESPN2 originally tended to be alternative sports such as poker, billiards, lumberjacking, extreme sports and, more recently, drum and bugle corps.

However, in recent years ESPN2 has broadcast increasingly more mainstream sporting events, including Major League Baseball games, the East–West Shrine Game, much of the 2006 World Baseball Classic, many Major League Soccer games, NCAA football games, NCAA basketball games, the WNBA, the Arena Football League, regular season KHL games, and Saturday afternoon NASCAR Nationwide Series races.

In 2011, ESPN2 acquired broadcast rights to delayed coverage for some American Le Mans Series events, with series' major events airing on ABC.

ESPN2 has simulcast many game telecasts with ESPN, usually as a part of a "Full Circle" or "Megacast" broadcast, which covers a single event across ESPN platforms with different forms of coverage.

In return, ESPN2 programming is often seen on ESPN during blackouts of games in certain markets.

ESPN2 often carries SportsCenter at times when the broadcast on ESPN is delayed by a sporting event that overruns into one of the program's scheduled timeslots.

ESPN and ESPN2 jointly aired two episodes of a documentary special called This is SportsCenter, in which ESPN showed a documentary showing the production of an edition of SportsCenter, while the finished product aired on ESPN2.

On March 16,2008, ESPN2 aired CBS-produced coverage of the SEC men's basketball championship game in most of the country.

ESPN2 has occasionally been used to carry simulcasts of ESPN Deportes' Spanish-language coverage of events, in an effort to boost availability of the Spanish broadcast and promote the ESPN Deportes channel, and reduce the need to counterprogram with lesser-viewed programs.