Space City Home Network

About Space City Home Network

Space City Home Network is a regional sports network serving Houston, Texas, and the surrounding Southeast Texas region as the local television home of Major League Baseball's Houston Astros and the NBA's Houston Rockets. Owned jointly by the two franchises through a joint venture, the network launched on October 3, 2023, after the teams acquired the former AT&T SportsNet Southwest from Warner Bros. Discovery. It carries more than 220 live Astros and Rockets games each year, along with team-related studio programming, regional college and high school sports, and behind-the-scenes content. Its official website is spacecityhn.com.

The road to Space City

Space City Home Network did not appear from nowhere; it is the latest incarnation of a channel with a long and turbulent Houston history. The network's roots trace back to 2012, when it signed on as Comcast SportsNet Houston, owned by Houston Regional Sports Network L.P., a joint venture of Comcast and the Astros and Rockets, following the closure of Fox Sports Houston. That channel filed for bankruptcy in 2013, and DirecTV and AT&T acquired the network out of the proceedings in 2014, relaunching it under the Root Sports brand as Root Sports Southwest. After DirecTV's acquisition by AT&T, the channel was rebranded again in 2017 as AT&T SportsNet Southwest, a name it carried for six years before Warner Bros. Discovery — the corporate successor of AT&T's WarnerMedia — announced in 2023 that it would exit the regional sports network business entirely. That decision set the stage for the Astros and Rockets to take their broadcast rights into their own hands.

The teams take control

On September 29, 2023, the Houston Astros and Houston Rockets jointly announced that they were acquiring AT&T SportsNet Southwest from Warner Bros. Discovery, effective September 30, and would relaunch it as Space City Home Network on October 3. The move made the Astros and Rockets the first pair of teams in a shared market to jointly own their regional sports network outright. In the announcement, Astros senior vice president and general counsel Giles Kibbe said the two organizations had worked hard to ensure that Space City Home Network would bring fans the same Astros and Rockets coverage from the faces and voices they knew and loved. Rockets president of business operations Gretchen Sheirr said the teams had worked alongside the network personnel to ensure a smooth changeover and looked forward to the positive impact of local ownership on the broadcast. Patrick Crumb, president of regional sports networks for Warner Bros. Discovery Sports, wished the teams success as they assumed ownership. The transition was designed to be seamless: fans could continue watching games on the same channels they already used.

Opening night on the new network

The first live game broadcast on Space City Home Network was the Rockets' preseason opener against the Indiana Pacers on October 10, 2023, a week after the formal relaunch. The 2023-24 Rockets season was the first full campaign for the network, and the 2024 Astros season was the first baseball season carried under the Space City banner. The joint-venture structure reflects the economics of the deal: the two teams continue to hold the exclusive local television rights to their own games, and the network's schedule is built around more than 220 live game telecasts annually. The continuity of on-air talent and production staff from the AT&T SportsNet era was a deliberate priority, meant to preserve what the teams described in their announcement as the award-winning quality that had made the network the premium destination for Rockets and Astros broadcasts.

A joint venture model for a changing industry

Space City Home Network arrived at a moment of upheaval in the regional sports network business. The bankruptcies and closures that swept through the RSN industry in the early 2020s — including Diamond Sports Group's bankruptcy and Warner Bros. Discovery's exit — left teams across the country scrambling to secure distribution for their games. The Astros and Rockets' answer was vertical integration: owning the network that owns their rights. The model gives the teams direct control over production quality, distribution negotiations, and the revenue split, at the cost of assuming the business risk that a national operator previously absorbed. Reporting at the time of the launch noted that the move implied a loss of an estimated $23 million of rights-fee revenue compared with the prior arrangement, underscoring the teams' bet that controlling the asset would pay off over the long term. Other franchises have watched the experiment closely as they consider similar team-owned structures.

Broadcast territory and distribution

The network's footprint spans cable and satellite systems throughout Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, parts of Oklahoma, and eastern New Mexico, and it is carried nationally on satellite through DirecTV. The breadth of the territory reflects the reach of the predecessor networks and the strength of the Astros and Rockets brands across the Gulf South and into the Southwest. For Astros fans, the games feed is also carried on the MLB.TV streaming service within the territory. Like every regional sports network, Space City Home Network's long-term future depends on carriage negotiations with distributors; the team's ownership structure was designed in part to give the network stability while those deals are struck. The seamless-transition promise of the launch — same channels, same voices — was aimed at preventing the kind of fan disruption that accompanied other RSN collapses around the country.

Programming beyond the games

Beyond live game broadcasts, Space City Home Network fills its schedule with studio programming built around the two teams: pre-game and post-game shows, analysis programs, behind-the-scenes features, and historical programming drawing on franchise archives. The network also carries regional college and high school sports content, a nod to the predecessor channel's role in the Houston sports ecosystem and a way to fill non-game hours with programming that has local relevance. The Astros' appearance in the 2022 World Series and the Rockets' championship legacy in the 1990s give the network a deep well of archival material, and the relaunch announcements emphasized that behind-the-scenes access and storytelling around the teams would remain a central part of the product.

The Astros partnership

The Astros' involvement in the network reflects the franchise's long history of broadcast innovation in Houston. For decades the team was carried on local channels before the RSN era; the franchise's World Series titles in 2017 and 2022 and its six consecutive American League Championship Series appearances from 2017 through 2022 made it one of baseball's most-watched regional properties. The joint ownership means the Astros have a direct hand in how their games are presented — from the broadcast team to the production values to the shoulder programming that frames the season. Giles Kibbe, the team's senior vice president and general counsel who served as the public face of the acquisition announcement, framed the purchase as a commitment to delivering great broadcasts for what he called the best fans in baseball.

The Rockets partnership

For the Rockets, the network secures the local television home of a franchise with a storied history, from the back-to-back NBA championships of 1994 and 1995 to the James Harden era of the 2010s. Rockets president of business operations Gretchen Sheirr emphasized the organization's strong relationship with the talent and staff inherited from AT&T SportsNet, whose Rockets broadcasts had won industry recognition. The Rockets' rebuilding roster in the 2020s made the network's studio programming and storytelling around young players a key part of the fan experience, complementing the live games. The nickname "Space City" — Houston's long-standing moniker, tied to the NASA Johnson Space Center — gives the network a civic identity that belongs to neither team alone, a deliberate branding choice for a channel that must speak to both fan bases.

What comes next for SCHN

Space City Home Network's first years have been defined by the experiment it represents: two major-league franchises jointly owning their broadcaster in an industry that is being remade by cord-cutting and the migration of sports rights to streaming. The network's durability will rest on its distribution deals, the on-court and on-field performance of the Rockets and Astros, and the ability of team ownership to run a media business as well as they run baseball and basketball teams. For now, the channel stands as Houston's home for its two flagship franchises — a locally owned sports network with a locally rooted name, carrying more than 220 live games a year to a five-state footprint, and betting that the future of regional sports television belongs to the teams themselves.