In the wee small hours of Monday morning, Root Sports Southwest will debut as the new home of the Rockets and Astros.

The sale of Houston Regional Sports Network, the corporate entity founded in 2003 by the Astros and Rockets to market their broadcast rights, to AT&T Teleholdings and DirecTV Sports Networks for $1,000 reportedly takes effect at 6 a.m. Monday. At that point in time, Comcast SportsNet Houston, the teams’ telecast outlet since the fall of 2012, will cease to exist.

For Comcast cable subscribers, Root Sports Southwest will air at channels 39 and 639 in the same slot where CSN Houston aired. One report indicated the channel will air at 674 on DirecTV and 758/1758 on U-verse, but those numbers could not be immediately confirmed.

However, enterprising web surfers happened across the new channel’s beta test website Saturday night, and word began to spread across the Houston area that appeared to confirm most of what viewers were anticipating from the new channel.

— Local programming will be limited for the moment to Rockets games, pregame and postgame shows plus Rice and University of Houston coaches shows, the weekly Rockets magazine show and a show called “Houston Football Insider.” No details were available on the latter program.

— On-air personnel will include the three CSN Houston staff members retained by DirecTV and AT&T – Kevin Eschenfelder, Bart Enis and Julia Morales – plus Astros game announcers Bill Brown and Alan Ashby and Rockets announcers and analysts Bill Worrell, Clyde Drexler, Matt Bullard and Calvin Murphy. (Astros game analyst Geoff Blum was not listed on the network website but is presumed to be coming back for the 2015 season, and Art Howe was listed on a website entry visible Saturday night as being a studio analyst, although that entry was no longer visible Sunday)

— As is the case with the other three Root Sports channels in Seattle, Pittsburgh and Denver, there are no nightly news shows or daily talk shows to match those on CSN Houston. Given the layoff of 96 of 141 employees, the cutback in local programming was expected.

— Other programming consists of infomercials, poker shows, extreme sport shows, mixed martial arts shows, syndicated talk shows hosted by Dan Patrick and Rich Eisen, a smattering of Mountain West Conference programming and reruns of CSN Houston’s “My Life” interview series hosted by Steve Bunin, the former ESPN anchor who was not retained by Root Sports Southwest.

— You will note the channel is Root Sports Southwest, not Root Sports Houston. That fits with the name Fox Sports Southwest, which broadcasts Rangers games across the same five-state area where Root Sports Southwest will show Astros games. The name may be an effort to offset perceptions that the new Root Sports channel is merely a local service, as some described it during CSN Houston’s unsuccessful carriage efforts in 2012-13.

Other details on the channel presumably will be forthcoming Monday.

CSN Houston was never available to more than 40 percent of the 2.2 million TV households in the 20-county Houston area, but the addition of DirecTV and U-verse will increase coverage substantially. One estimate is that Comcast, DirecTV and AT&T together service about 1.4 million of the area’s 2.2 million TV households, which would boost penetration to about 63 percent of all households and three-quarters of households wired for cable, satellite or telco service (Houston has nearly 300,000 such households, among the largest percentages in the nation).

Still unaccounted for are Suddenlink, which by one estimate has nearly 60,000 subscribers in the Houston area, and Dish Network, which has about 300,000. Also apparently unaccounted for, at least for the moment, will be Time Warner Cable, which has systems throughout Texas and is in the process of merging with Comcast.

Suddenlink has not commented on whether it will carry Root Sports Southwest. A Dish Network spokesperson said last week, “We’re interested in high-quality content at an appropriate value. If that balance can be struck, we’re willing to consider it.”

The launch of Root Sports Southwest brings to an end this portion of the CSN Houston bankruptcy court saga, which began in September 2013 when Comcast plunged the channel into an involuntary Chapter 11 case when it was unable to pay the Astros’ broadcast rights fees and the Astros were on the verge of retaking those rights, which would have doomed the network.

ATY&T and DirecTV will invest $50 million in the network, which is expected to continue losing money for at least the next two years, and the teams will lose their equity in the venture, which at one point was valued at $700 million.

Comcast, which opposed the bankruptcy reorganization plan that resulted in the sale to AT&T and DirecTV, continues to appeal portions of the decision but did not attempt to block the launch of Root Sports Southwest.