Once the country's dominant sports broadcaster, in recent years it has lost many of its past signature properties – such as the
Canadian Football League,
Toronto Blue Jays baseball,
Canadian Curling Association championships, the
Olympic Games for a period, the
FIFA World Cup, and the
National Hockey League – to the cable specialty channels
TSN and
Sportsnet. The CBC has maintained partial rights to the NHL as part of a sub-licensing agreement with current rightsholder
Rogers Media (maintaining the Saturday-night Hockey Night in Canada and playoff coverage), although this coverage is produced by Sportsnet, as opposed to the CBC itself as was the case in the past.
As a result of funding reductions from the federal government, increased costs for licensing, and decreased revenues, in April 2014, the CBC announced it would no longer bid for professional sports broadcasting rights.[1] The CBC has since used its digital platforms to provide overflow coverage of events not on television, and simulcasts of television coverage. Since then, the CBC's in-house sports coverage has been largely focused on
Olympic sports, other domestic
amateur and semi-professional competitions such as the
Canadian Hockey League (CHL), along with coverage of
Spruce Meadows'
show jumping competitions.
The majority of CBC Television's sports coverage is broadcast on weekend afternoons, under the blanket title CBC Sports Presents (formerly Road to the Olympic Games from 2015 to 2022, and CBC Sports Weekend prior to 2015).[2][3] CBC Sports also streams all of its programming, as well as other event coverage not shown on television, via its website and digital platforms.
Former CEO of Curling Canada
Greg Stremlaw was the head of CBC Sports from April 10, 2015[4][2] to January, 2019.[5]
CBC Sports Hall of Fame recognizes those broadcasters of CBC Sports who have made a unique and lasting contribution to CBC and to the sports broadcasting industry.[29]
In 2008, the CBC received CRTC approval for a sports
specialty channel, "CBC SportsPlus", which would have aired a mix of amateur and professional sports. The application was controversial, with
CTVglobemedia, Rogers Media, and
The Score among others filing interventions against the channel for being unduly competitive with existing sports channels (therefore violating the CRTC's then-policy of genre protection among specialty channels). They showed particular concern for the CBC stating that it planned to devote 75% of its programming to professional sports. The CRTC approved the license application, but restricted it to only devoting 30% of its schedule per-week to professional sports, with only 10% of this quota allowed to be devoted to "professional stick and/or ball sports".[30][31]