About: Olympic Channel (American TV channel)

Olympic Channel (branded as Olympic Channel: Home of Team USA) was an American pay television sports channel owned by the NBC Olympics, a joint venture between NBC Sports and the United States Olympic Committee. It was dedicated to Olympic sports, and was a franchise of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Olympic Channel operation. The network was founded in 2003 as Bravo HD+, which aired programs from the fellow NBC Universal network Bravo that had been produced in high definition. In 2004, the network was re-branded as Universal HD, serving as an outlet for HD broadcasts of programming from NBC Universal channels, as well as acquired films and television series. This format became increasingly redundant by the 2010s, as most mainstream cable networks were now being broadcast in the format. As such, in 2015, NBC Sports began to use the channel and sister NBCSN as an outlet for the programming of the defunct Universal Sports, consisting mainly of coverage of events in Olympic sports held outside of the Olympic Games. In 2017, the channel relaunched as Olympic Channel, which continued this focus as a companion to NBCUniversal’s broadcast rights to the Olympics; alongside Olympic and Paralympic sport coverage, it also carried documentaries and other programming chronicling the Olympic Games and its history, shoulder programming during the Olympics proper, and coverage of the Paralympic Games since 2018 (alongside NBCSN). In 2021, the channel aired live event coverage during the Olympics for the first (and ultimately, only) time. On July 1, 2022, NBCUniversal announced that Olympic Channel would be shut down on September 30, 2022, with plans to move its programming to other outlets to be determined.

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