When the show premiered nationally in the mid-1980s, the only highlights available to sports fans on Sunday nights were those on late local newscasts and the ESPN and CNN cable networks, creating an audience niche for "Sports Machine" to fill. By the later years of "Sports Machine," however, the rise of numerous specialty cable sports channels (notably ESPNews) and the expansion of Sunday evening local newscasts to either air an extended sportscast (an "extra" in common parlance) or a separate program to recap Sunday football and baseball action caused many stations to either drop the program or air it later in the night—issues made even worse in 2006, when NBC acquired the rights to "Sunday Night Football", which in turn pushed late local news on most of the "Sports Machine's" affiliates even later.