Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Media Days Recap For CFB TV Items

A brief recap of TV related items coming out of the various college football media days.  This is going to be a bit of a link-fest, so read them all:

* This whole ACC Network thing.  Joe Ovies and David Teel also did some great work on the subject on the ground at ACC Media Days.  They got great feedback on the perception of cord cutting, where the content is coming from, etc.

* Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany made an informal announcement regarding the new TV deals with ESPN, FOX Sports, CBS and an extension with BTN.  A bit light on details, but Delany noted that he had to get approval from the TV partners to discuss it since some of the contractual details were not final.
One point of interest is Delany discussing "cross-promotion" of games, which is something I've been curious to see whether a conference would attempt to place on its TV partners, similar to some of the breaks you may seen in NBA games where ESPN, TNT and NBA TV are required to show a graphic & tell the viewer where the next week's worth of national telecasts will be shown, regardless of network.  It also appears that the Big Ten's telecasts will have some form of branding on ESPN and FOX Sports, similar to the "SEC on ESPN" and "ACC on ESPN" branding that occurs today.

* C-USA.TV debuted this week as a Sidearm Sports hosted site.  True to what Conference USA has said, the site will be a subscription based site either by school or for the entire conference.  It isn't much different than the CBS based site that C-USA worked off of for years.

Harry Minium of the Virginian-Pilot was also able to extract from C-USA commissioner Judy MacLeod that additional streaming partners would be announced next week.  Campus Insiders was at C-USA Media Day and it appears they'll be one of the streaming partners.   Minium also noted that ASN would be picking up more games for telecast.

I'm curious to see if C-USA.TV is a stop-gap until all schools have production equipment up to the standard that ESPN requires for ESPN3 webcasts, and if football will be inside or outside the subscription service.  Several soccer games are already in the schedule on the service.  I assume that once the other streaming partners are finalized, we'll find out exactly what football games are part of C-USA.TV.

* Speaking of content partners being at media days where they don't officially have a tie-in to a conference, ASN was at the Sun Belt Media Day.  And that makes sense when you consider that some Sun Belt games remain without start times for the opening three weeks and there's this nugget from RedditCFB (via CUSABBS):
So ESPN may be working on a deal with ASN similar to their deal with the MAC for sublicensed content in both football & basketball.  Might also be why the minimum for C-USA football and basketball was a bit lower since the two conferences have some overlap in land areas.

EDIT: * Greg Madia of Harrisonburg's Daily News-Record was able to get some information on the CAA's TV future, which enters the final year of their TV deal (hat tip to LFN):
This might have been why ESPN3 provided video of CAA Media Day and a deal could be forthcoming.  It wouldn't surprise me to see NBCSN scale back, but leaving a longer term relationship with Comcast SportsNet would be slightly eyeraising.  As Madia's article notes, NBCSN may not be at the table, but CSN regionals and Sinclair's ASN, two regional TV partners, are still in contact with the conference.
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