NASCAR on television and radio

The television and radio rights to broadcast NASCAR on television and radio are one of the most expensive rights of any American sport, with the current television contract with Fox Sports and NBC Sports being worth around US$8 billion.

In the early days of the sport, sports programs like CBS Sports Spectacular and ABC Wide World of Sports would air video highlight packages of NASCAR races. These packages were typically 15 to 30 minutes long that were cut from film of the entire race. This is similar to video packages created by NFL Films. For major races, like the Daytona 500, ABC Sports would show it live for a certain number of laps at the beginning and come back to it to show the end of the race. There had been a few races shown in their entirety in the 1970s, but these were always recorded and shown days or weeks later.

In 1979, CBS Sports televised the entire 1979 Daytona 500 live from start to finish. When ESPN came along in 1981, more races began being shown live in their entirety. Since 1992, all NASCAR races have been shown from start to finish, and all have been shown live since 1997. Until 2001, race tracks struck individual agreements with networks to broadcast races, but NASCAR wanted to capitalize on the growing popularity of the sport and announced in 1999 that television contracts would now be centralized; that is, instead of making agreements with individual tracks, networks would now negotiate directly with NASCAR for the rights to air a package of races.

One of the earliest telecasts of a NASCAR race was the 1960 Daytona 500, parts of which was presented as part of CBS Sports Spectacular, with announcer Bud Palmer.

In the ensuing years, but before 1979, there were three main sources of NASCAR telecasts:

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