Universal Sports Network now a pay-TV channel

In the wide world of pay-to-see sports channels, add this new one: the Universal Sports Network.

Removed from free over-the-air TV in the Philadelphia area and 51 other cities on Jan. 1, the channel is now available only behind the pay wall on cable and satellite.

Part of the boom in 24-hour sports programming, Universal Sports is partly owned by Comcast/NBCUniversal and joins a crowded field of sports channels on pay TV, where, increasingly, viewers find professional, amateur, and college athletics.

Universal Sports' rights portfolio comprises deals with 16 international and six U.S. sports federations. It presents 1,200 hours a year of skiing, figure skating, track and field, and swimming. In addition, the channel shows endurance races such as the New York and Boston Marathons.

For those without cable who watched Universal Sports on over-the-air NBC stations, the decision came as a letdown.

"I liked it because it had all different sports," said Jane Meyers, 58, of Wynnefield. "And it had a lot of sports that you didn't see on [free] TV anymore." Getting cable or satellite isn't an option, she said, "because of the bills coming in the door."

Meyers watched on an NBC10 multicast channel. Such channels became available after TV broadcasters switched to digital signals from analog, a conversion ordered by the U.S. government that was completed in 2009.

Digital signals allow TV stations to broadcast more than one channel over the air. One of the rationales for multicasting was to make more programming available to free-TV viewers.

"Universal Sports is easily my favorite station," Al Richardson, a resident of Fort Worth, Texas, who regularly visits the Philadelphia area, said in an e-mail. "Year-round, it carries mostly Olympic sports that are hard or impossible to find anywhere else. . . . The coverage is good, with a lot of the Olympic announcers and of course the same athletes. It's a shame this great sports network has been yanked."

David Sternberg, chief executive officer of Universal Sports Network, based in a Los Angeles suburb, said the sports channel had built an audience through its multicasting and always had planned to pursue the pay-TV model. He estimated Universal Sports reached about 36 million homes through over-the-air multicasting.