| Comcast Sports Southeast Charter Sports Southeast |
|
|---|---|
| Launched | 1999 |
| Owned by | NBCUniversal Charter Communications |
| Country | United States |
| Language | American English |
| Broadcast area | Alabama Arkansas Florida Georgia Kentucky Louisiana Mississippi North Carolina South Carolina Tennessee Texas Virginia West Virginia |
| Website | CSS Sports |
Comcast Sports Southeast/Charter Sports Southeast (CSS) is a cable regional sports network based in Atlanta, Georgia, and serving 6 million cable subscribers across twelve U.S. states. It is a joint venture between Comcast (through NBCUniversal) and Charter Communications, and appears on many of the two companies' cable systems across the Southern United States. The initials stand for Comcast Sports Southeast in Comcast markets and Charter Sports Southeast in Charter markets; the legal name for the network is Cable Sports Southeast, LLC. Despite the co-ownership, the network's logo uses the "crescent C" from the Comcast logo. CSS is only available on terrestrial cable, and is used as a selling point of terrestrial cable service over satellite services such as DirecTV and Dish Network. For the same purpose, CSS is occasionally offered to subscribers of other cable systems that may or may not compete with Comcast or Charter in their specific markets.
CSS may also refer to Comcast Sports Southwest, a new local sports channel delivering the most comprehensive local college and high school sports coverage for Houston-area athletes and sports fans.[1]
CSS is in direct competition with Fox Sports South and SportSouth, both of which are RSNs owned by News Corporation and based in Atlanta. All three networks share some programming, including college coaches' shows. CSS, by and large, has closer relationships with many of the region's individual colleges and universities, whereas Fox Sports South and SportSouth have ties to most of the South's professional sports teams and the Southeastern and Atlantic Coast conferences as wholes. CSS, on the other hand, will regularly broadcast live sporting events of some of the smaller and less heralded colleges of the region, as well as those of some of the large SEC and ACC schools (for example, college baseball coverage includes SEC, ACC, Sun Belt, C-USA, and Atlantic Sun conference games[2]). During football season, CSS produces its own feeds of many of the region's major college games exclusively for tape-delayed broadcasts, even though the games may have aired live on other networks.
Local cable systems are able to pre-empt normal CSS programming in favor of local sporting events, such as high school football and basketball games and local collegiate sporting events.
CSS is home to a nightly sports talk show known as SportsNite. On most Comcast SportsNet systems, this program is in a newscast format similar to SportsCenter, but on CSS, it more closely resembles a southern-exclusive version of FSN's The Best Damn Sports Show Period.
CSS also broadcasts the WNBA Atlanta Dream, Arena Football League Georgia Force, Orlando Predators and Tampa Bay Storm, Major League Lacrosse, Southern League and South Atlantic League Minor League baseball, and previously broadcasted some CFL contests.
In March 2008, CSS's owners Comcast and Charter struck separate deals with the Atlanta Braves to simulcast 45 regular season and 2 exhibition games produced and broadcast in the Atlanta metropolitan area by WPCH-TV. The broadcasts are available on CSS on Charter and Comcast cable systems throughout Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia (except for Metro Atlanta), and the city of Asheville, North Carolina.[3][4] Regular CSS programming airs during Braves games in Metro Atlanta and markets outside the Braves territory, as well as other cable systems that do not use CSS as the redistribution channel for WPCH Braves broadcasts.
Beginning in April 2009, CSS will broadcast at least 25 Gwinnett Braves games for the next four seasons.[5]
In 2009, CSS debuted a new graphics package used during live sports programming produced by the network, which mirrors that of the Comcast SportsNet-branded networks.