Empire Sports Network

Empire Sports Network was an American regional sports network that was owned by the Adelphia Communications Corporation. The network was available on cable providers in much of upstate New York (stretching from Buffalo to Albany), as well as parts of northern Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. The network ceased operations on March 7, 2005, in the midst of Adelphia's financial collapse and bankruptcy.

Empire Sports Network launched on December 31, 1990; its first broadcast that evening was a National Hockey League game between the Buffalo Sabres and the Philadelphia Flyers. Founded by John Rigas (founder and chief executive officer of network parent Adelphia Communications), the idea for Empire Sports was first conceived in 1989; Rigas decided to operate the new network in Buffalo, instead of in Adelphia's corporate homebase of Coudersport, Pennsylvania, a rural borough dozens of miles away from the nearest major sports teams. Originally broadcasting as a part-time service for four hours each night from 8:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m., the network originally carried games from the Sabres (carrying locally televised games not broadcast on Fox affiliate WUTV (channel 29), which carried the team's games under a separate contract), the Buffalo Bisons of the International League and Major League Baseball games from the Pittsburgh Pirates. Empire was an outgrowth of the Niagara Frontier Sports Network (NFSN), a partnership between the Sabres and Adelphia that had carried Sabres games on cable on a part-time basis through much of the 1980s.

Adelphia launched the network without seeking a specified carriage fee rate, offering Empire Sports to cable providers for free on a "good faith" basis. However, in June 1991, Tele-Communications Inc. briefly dropped the network from its systems in New York state, after TCI decided against carrying it without a firm carriage agreement. In October 1991, the network became an affiliate of the Prime Network group of regional sports networks; at that time, the network expanded its programming schedule to 19 hours per day, operating from 5:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m.

On August 10, 1994, Empire acquired the exclusive regional television rights to the Sabres; as part of the deal, Empire also struck a deal with WUTV parent Act III Broadcasting to air over-the-air simulcasts of ten regular season games (a third of the 30 games that the station had been carrying under a separate contract with the team) and any playoff games during the term of the agreement. By 1995, Empire had expanded its carriage to TCI systems in Rochester and Syracuse; the network expanded its statewide coverage eastward to Albany and Binghamton. The next year, 1996, saw the Prime Network converted to Fox Sports Net, and Empire thus became an FSN affiliate, airing nationally provided sports programming from Fox and in turn contributing footage to FSN shows such as Fox Sports News.

The Sabres' relationship with Empire Sports strengthened in 1998, when Adelphia and the Rigas family purchased the team. Following the purchase, the network expanded its coverage of the team, culminating in the Sabres' advancement to the Stanley Cup Final in May 1999, when it provided 12 hours of coverage daily from 12:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. during the championship series. The network's unbridled coverage of the Sabres caught the attention of the National Hockey League, with league Commissioner Gary Bettman commenting that "if the rest of the league was covered like Empire Sports covers the Sabres, we would be as big as the NFL." By 2001, Empire Sports had over 6.7 million subscribers via both cable providers in New York, northern Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio and nationally on satellite.

Between October 2000 and March 2004, Adelphia, under vice president/general manager Bob Koshinski, used staff from Empire to operate Wethersfield radio station WNSA (107.7 FM). The station overtook WGR (550 AM) as the ratings leader among the Buffalo market's two sports radio stations in the spring of 2001, but subsequently lost several of its talent, including prominent afternoon host Mike Schopp, to WGR when the Rigas/Adelphia scandal broke.

Empire Sports thrived until March 2002, when the Securities and Exchange Commission began investigating accusations of internal corruption and securities violations by Adelphia executives (including John Rigas and his son, chief operating officer Timothy Rigas), leading up to the company's subsequent bankruptcy filing, as Adelphia was mired in off-balance-sheet debt totaling $2.3 billion. With Adelphia in freefall and under temporary bank-appointed management, Empire was unable to renew its carriage agreement with Time Warner Cable, its largest non-Adelphia customer and the primary cable provider for nearly all of upstate New York, in the fall of 2002; TWC continued to carry Empire on its Syracuse system for eight months without a carriage deal in place, later announcing plans to replace it with the Outdoor Life Network on May 1, 2003. Empire Sports and Time Warner Cable struck an agreement in April 2003, which would significantly reduce its coverage by migrating the network from TWC's analog service to a digital sports tier in Syracuse and Binghamton.

The network continued to operate, but was dealt another severe blow in 2003 when Adelphia's board of directors appointed William Schleyer as its new chief executive officer and Ron Cooper as its chief operating officer. With questions surrounding whether Adelphia was even still interested in being in the lucrative regional sports business and if Empire Sports would survive its parent's ongoing collapse, the company laid off 27 full-time employees and all freelancers on August 19. The staff cuts forced Empire to immediately eliminate the popular news/call-in show Fan TV, but the network itself was still able to survive for another eighteen months.