CBS-owned CSTV Networks announced today a college sports junkie’s dream come true — the launch of more than 100 new broadband channels devoted to live college sports. Collectively the channels will offer more than 10,000 live events, including audio, video and live data feeds of press conferences, news, features, archived games, plus ticketing, e-commerce and other features.
These channels are subscription-only, but the fees are relatively low, with some schools, such as Notre Dame, offering their programming at no charge to users. The schools are in charge of the content that gets put up on the site (accessible at www.CSTVXXL.com) and prices range from $4.95/month to $9.95/month.
The channels are a natural idea for the broadband era, given how many college sports games there are, how few of those events make it to TV and how loyal students and alumni are to their schools. “Every year there are over 100,000 games that take place across the college sports landscape and maybe only 1,000 or 1,500 make it onto television,” CEO Brian Bedol said during a call to announce the new channels.
The technology back-end, provided in part by thePlatform, has sophisticated black-out capabilities Bedol said, to get around market-based sports black-out rules. The other major tech vendor supporting this massive effort is Maven Networks.
Each of the channels corresponds to a college or university and CSTV has lined up practically every major college sports powerhouse in the nation, including Auburn, BYU, Memphis, Miami, Navy, North Carolina, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Pittsburgh, Stanford, Tennessee, Tulane, Villanova, UCLA, UNLV, USC and Washington. The schools that haven’t signed up will probably do so soon. “My guess is that you’re going to see pretty rapid adoption,” Bedol said.
Cynthia Brumfield at 6:44 PM|Comments(0)
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