The History of Espn

$91, That’s all it cost to have ESPN incorporated back in 1978 when it was only run by three people, Bill Rasmussen, Scott Rasmussen, and Ed Eagan. Now if you take a look at ESPN today, you’ll see one of the world’s largest broadcast corporations. The History of ESPN is a long and pretty interesting story. As stated above, the history of ESPN truly begins on September 7th, 1978, when the three founders paid $91 to have the company incorporated. After deciding to go with a 24-hour broadcasting schedule, ESPN debuted with Sports Center later that month and then began to air a large variety of sports ranging from the professional softball to NCAA wrestling. Their fist dabble into a massive professional sport would be with the United States Football League, who’s games would be aired on the network.
The league only survived for three years, but it gave the network the experience it needed when they gained partial rights to air Sunday Night football games, in 1987. Sunday Night Football would be on the network for nineteen years, till they switched to Monday nights. These are just the starting years to the massive behemoth that is ESPN. The 1990’s, a good a time period as any for ESPN. They gained rights to air MLB games, and also saw the founding of ESPN 2, in 1993.
ESPN radio kicked off a year before ESPN 2, in 1992, making the company multi-medial. 1996 saw the presence of Disney corporation, the parent company of ESPN, merge ABC sports and ESPN together. In 1997, ESPN started using SKYCAM to air it’s NHL games, and would soon put that innovative tech to use with the three other major sports leagues, MLB, NFL, and NBA. Company founders were long gone now, and things were looking really good for the future of the company.