Sports fans today can watch more games and global competitions than we could have possibly imagined, even 20 years ago. For those of us that can remember, which generally means Boomers and Gen-X, there really weren’t many sports to watch until the advent of pay-TV in the mid-80s, which saw the dawn of specialty channels like CNN, MTV, and ESPN, plus TSN and MuchMusic up in Canada.
As specialty channels found their way into more and more homes, the business really took off, which is where Phil King comes in. As a top executive at TSN and later CTV, Phil oversaw a portfolio of conventional and specialty channels that afforded him an enviable position in rights negotiations with the biggest sports and entertainment properties on the planet, as we learned in this episode.
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