Just tried to see whats on USN until monday night football and got a banner saying channel is no longer available. NBC has bought them out? How will i watch Gwen tear it up now?? What about televised IM events? I am in panic mode.
I think NBC only bought the Olympic coverage. This news hit about a month ago, maybe longer.
There is no broadcast on the channel. I turn it on and it says “universal sports channel has ceased”
There are links to nbc sports.
Yes, it’s gone for good. This SUCKS!
The link they have up on the channel is: http://www.nbcsports.com/olympic-sports. When you go there, they have a schedule up that includes future transmissions on Universal HD, which no longer exists. Obviously, Mr. right hand doesn’t know what Mr. left hand is doing.
No more ITU triathlons, no more Ironman triathlons, no more oddball triathlons from Great Britain, no more cyclocross, no more Giro,d’talia, no more “small” cycling races with world class riders from all over, no more sailing races, no more windsurfing and kiteboarding, no more surfing, no more marathons from Berlin, London, and everywhere else, no more Diamond League; this channel was the only one covering all of these, so called, niche sports.
Go to the link above, do a search on “triathlon”, and you’ll find no events, just a half a dozen older articles, two of which are about NASCAR drivers doing triathlons. Nothing against that, but really, **WAY TO GO NBC! **
Verry disappointed! Ugh.
At least the ITU stuff has live coverage online and VOD with the full races as well as the Magazine shows for a nominal fee. Helps me pass trainer time.
Actually, Universal HD is a channel that is still alive. It’s not a sports only channel and has a Hodge podge of stuff on.
While NBCSports may keep some of what Universal Sports carried, I don’t see them having room for everything.
I’m in the bummed out camp.
Yes, Universal HD is a different channel from the now defunct Universal Sports Network. Very sad to see USN go. For posterity sake I recorded the last two shows late Sunday night, it went off the air at midnight.
I had Universal sports on last night when it went off of the air. I wanted to see how it would end. It went off the air 6pm EST Monday. They went directly from a commercial telling about all of the winter sports they were going to show to the banner saying it was off the air and go to the NBCSN/Olympic Sports link. Like as been stated, Universal HD is a totally different channel. I looked at the upcoming schedule and they will show the Santos tour Down Under in January on the Live stream and Universal HD.
Unfortunately, I don’t think we even get that one here in NYC on Time Warner.
This season’s bike races were carried like never before on Universal Sports; there were so many that kept popping up on our DVR; it was the best year ever.
Now this…
We can get it but it is extra package charge with Time Warner in Raleigh. I think it may be time to pull the plug instead of helping the cable bill beast keep growing.
What will Todd Gogolski do now!!
I hope this is just a bad dream, and we’ll wake up tomorrow and all will be well again.
I checked our DVR; it’s down to 14% now, but there are two triathlons on there, all that I have left to treasure the brief, shining moment that was Universal Sports: one is called the Ben Nevis Braveheart from Scotland; that sounds interesting, and what I guess is a rebroadcast of the annual Al Trautwig tear-jerker from Kona, but treasure them I will, saving and re-savoring them till one day, our DVR again fills!
Oh, bloody period.
This was one of the main reasons that I am still a Directv customer, I am very disappointing that this is gone.
Does Direct TV have an equivalent? It’s not a Time Warner issue, this time.
Universal was first acquired by NBC, then shut down.
Aren’t there some possible antitrust implications, here?
There was some talk that the IOC wants to start their own channel. While NBC owned just a small part of Universal Sports, with NBC having the Olympic broadcast rights there was some potential conflict if the IOC launched their channel. I guess Deal Dash and Home Advisor was not enough to pay all of the bills.
This was one of the main reasons that I am still a Directv customer, I am very disappointing that this is gone.
Flip over to channel 569 and, as of 11/20 Universal will be picking up a fairly good slate of Alpine skiing and figure skating. If effectively merging Universal sports into Universal HD means that we end up with reruns of House propping up the Olympic sports coverage, then I’m kind of okay with not being able to view the tenth rerun of the Tour de Ski.
I’m also a little more optimistic now that we’ll get a reasonably good cycling slate of programming come spring since it was probably one of the slightly more viewed sports they had. Plus, US was never in HD on Directv and it always looked like a badly rebroadcast YouTube video circa 2007 when they aired the Vuelta.
this last spring, BEIN sports televised a fair number of the Spring classics as well as the Giro. Universal HD, at this point is only offered on the most expensive tier on Fios…I’ve been looking into Sling TV and reducing or getting rid of cable all together.
My complaint about BeIn is that football trumps all other sports on the channel and they will just not bother to, say, broadcast days 2&4 out of a 5 day Tour of Croatia if they can be covering a Venezuela-Bolivia friendly on day 2 and exciting Indonesian Premier League action on Day 4 instead.
I think we only got essentially the whole Giro last year after complaints because I can remember several days originally being missing from the schedule when I was trying to set my DVR to pick it up.
I found the same to be true. Also, they will change their schedule at the last moment sometimes taking away and sometimes adding a race.