2007-2008 NCAA Football

[DeltAlum]

A first game can be a little rough, especially for a new crew in a new truck. I heard that the Big Ten Network commissioned two brand new high definition trucks of their own since their contract is twenty years between the conference and the Chicago FSN local. That's a pretty big committment, and new trucks take a few games to iron out all of the little kinks sometimes.

I wish we had our own trucks, but that's a huge expense. We rent like pretty much everyone else.

It was also probably the first time the entire crew had worked together as well. That's tricky. I know, because the NBC games I directed in the past were not the national game of the week and I never had the same truck or the same crew (except producer and announcers which were constant) at all. Ever. It takes a little while to get into a rhythm.

Taking a shot at your questions, the chairman of the FCC has suggested that ALL cable be ala carte. If that's even possible with today's technology, my guess is that it would be pretty hard to track and the extra work in billing and the additional computer technology needed would probably drive up the costs of all of the services, and, as you point out, some of the weaker ones would probably not survive. That being said, there's a ton of stuff on my cable package that I could do without, so the bottom line result might be comparable. Of course my network is 50% owned by Comcast (and 50% by CSTV/CBS) so I get my cable free. Sorry.

That, by the way, is a difference between us and the BTN which is 51% owned by the Big Ten Conference. The conference has no direct financial interest in our network. One upside in that for us is that they can't really intrude into the content side of our sports/news type of shows.

Now, for everyone's information, all (or all I'm aware of) commercial driven cable and satellite networks make money in two ways. First is by advertising revenue and second is by a per subscriber fee that the network charges the cable company or Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) service. It's no surprize that the most expensive is ESPN. The figures you mention ($1.10 and $0.10) sound more like subscriber fees per month than Pay Per View (PPV) fees which are generally considerably higher (comparable probably to a PPV movie for instance, which in our area is probably $5-7 per movie -- um, or game). It's probably not in the BTN's best interest, though, to do a PPV thing and dilute the impact of the network itself.

Finally, as for the marquee games, those currently go to the "major" networks for over the air broadcast. The networks pay the conference big bucks for those games and I would be shocked if that changes.

OK, so the above wasn't really "finally."

Remember that the driving force behind this movement is NOT the networks themselves, but rather the conferences who want more control over their own destiny in terms of dollars and scheduling -- and also want more exposure for the weaker teams in the conference. The Ohio State/Michigan game will probably never be on BTN (except as a rerun) because it's too lucrative in terms of dollars from the major networks.

I understand that BTN is doing what we've done here recently and that is a media campaign to try to get viewers to put pressure on the cable systems to carry the network. We're doing it to pressure the DBS services.

So, while that doesn't get pictures and sound of your team into your living room, I hope it gives you a little bit of insight into what's going on.

As I said above, speculation is that the SEC will be next, followed by conferences like the Pac 10, Big 12, ACC etc. as their contracts with the major networks expire.