Fox Sports Wisconsin

Fox Sports Wisconsin (FSWI) is an American regional sports network that is owned by Diamond Sports Group, and operates as an affiliate of Fox Sports Networks. Operating as the "Wisconsin" sub-feed of Fox Sports North until 2007, the channel broadcasts regional coverage of sports events throughout the state of Wisconsin, with a focus on professional sports teams based in Milwaukee. It primarily operates from a studio/office facility in downtown Milwaukee, with secondary offices and production studio/office hub based in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Fox Sports Wisconsin is available on cable providers throughout Wisconsin, extreme eastern Minnesota, the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan, northwestern Illinois, and Iowa; it is also available nationwide on satellite via DirecTV.
Fox Sports Wisconsin broadcasts 2,600 hours of locally produced programming per year and reaches more than 1.7 million homes.
==History==
The first regional sports network in the state was the Wisconsin Sports Network (unrelated to the current-day high school-focused sports publishing operation), a gametime-only network that broadcast Milwaukee Brewers baseball and Milwaukee Bucks basketball games. The channel was owned by Time Warner Cable's Milwaukee franchise and Group W. In 1996, it was taken over by the Minneapolis-based Midwest Sports Channel, which was owned by CBS owned-and-operated station WCCO-TV (channel 4) in Minneapolis and CBS Cable (which was formed following CBS' 1995 merger with Group W's corporate parent Westinghouse). Shortly afterward, MSC became an affiliate of the fledgling Fox Sports Net in the fall of 1996.
From then on until 2007, Wisconsin was served by one of three regional subfeeds of MSC/FSN North; the other two being a feed for the Twin Cities metropolitan area and a feed for the rest of Minnesota (as well as Iowa, North Dakota and South Dakota). CBS sold the network to News Corporation in 2000, ultimately rebranding as FSN North in April 2001. Despite being well out of the station's market area, MSC's late night encore of WCCO's 10:00 p.m. newscast also aired on the Wisconsin network until the Fox purchase. The network then began maintaining offices at the studios of Fox owned-and-operated station WITI (channel 6, now an affiliate of the network) in the Milwaukee suburb of Brown Deer, along with sharing limited programming with that station.
FSN North converted the Wisconsin feed into a separate channel, FSN Wisconsin. The channel launched on April 1, 2007, coinciding with the start of the 2007 Milwaukee Brewers season, originating from facilities in Milwaukee. After Fox Television Stations sold WITI to Local TV in 2008, FSN Wisconsin relocated its operations to facilities in downtown Milwaukee. As part of the national rebranding of the Fox Sports Networks in 2012, FSN Wisconsin was rebranded as Fox Sports Wisconsin.
Category:Television stations