The ACC celebrated the announcement of the long-awaited ACC Network during the league’s annual “Football Media Days,” but one sports media expert writes that there is still significant work to be done.
John Ourand, a writer with The Sports Business Journal, reportedly spoke with “several anonymous distribution executives” who suggested the league might struggle to find cable companies willing to carry the network.
Ourand, one of the industry’s leading writers in sports and television, wrote on Monday that “executives said the launch of a new sports service flies in the face of the industry’s trend of providing lower-cost tiers of programming.”
With many consumers looking to cut down or eliminate their cable bills, rather than increase them, cable companies might think twice before adding that cost to their subscribers.
Ourand reports that “sources expect ESPN to price the ACC Network similar to SEC Network, which at launch was around $1.30 per subscriber per month in-market and around 25 cents per subscriber per month out-of-market.”
The SEC, though, is different from the ACC in some key aspects. College football is the most popular property and the depth of quality SEC football teams means that, even after marquee games are put on national television, there are quality games remaining for the SEC Network each week. That argument will be tougher to make in a top-heavy ACC, where Clemson and Florida State are generally taken for national broadcasts.
Ourand writes that ESPN will try to counter this argument by pointing to the marquee teams in each revenue sports, a group that includes the two football programs, as well as Duke and North Carolina basketball.
“But the sports media market has changed dramatically since SEC Network launched in August 2014,” Ourand writes. “ESPN has lost more than 6 million subscribers since that time, according to Nielsen estimates. Plus, cable operators have become more emboldened in carriage fights with sports networks, such as Comcast, which allowed YES Network to go dark on its Connecticut systems, and DirecTV, which has yet to cut a deal for either Pac-12 Networks or SportsNet LA.”
The announcement from ACC Media Days should still be viewed as welcome news by Syracuse fans. The ACC believes the network will significantly shrink the revenue gap between the ACC and the SEC and Big Ten It also increases the stability of the conference long-term, eliminating concerns that Florida State or Clemson could bolt.
Unlike the Pac-12 Network, which has struggled the most, the ACC’s channel is backed by ESPN, one of biggest heavyweights in the world of sports. ESPN has until 2019 before the linear channel goes live.
Still, all of this is worth monitoring. There could be some discomfort coming for those accustomed to being able to watch every game on television. If individual cable providers elect not to pass along the additional cost, Syracuse fans could be forced to switch cable companies to watch every game or simply live without the television option.
