FSN Renews Pac-10 College-Basketball Deal
By Mike Reynolds -- Multichannel News, 5/5/2006 12:56:00 PM
USC and UCLA alumni on the East Coast may get to see their alma maters’ college-basketball games as part of a carriage deal reached Thursday between the Pacific 10 Conference and FSN.
As part of a renewal deal that keeps FSN as the Pac-10’s exclusive national basketball television partner through the 2011-12 season, the programmer scored the rights to distribute games live and delayed within a 30-day window via cable and satellite video-on-demand, wireless mobile and broadband-video Internet platforms, according to FSN president Bob Thompson.
FSN executives would not confirm any VOD distribution deals, nor would they say whether FSN would build a dedicated Pac-10 Internet site for carriage of the games.
“But it is those kinds of exploitations that necessitate the requirement that we acquire a broad range of rights in these kind of deals,” FSN executive vice president of network development and rights acquisition David Rone said when asked about the video-broadband rights. “We want to be in a position to exploit [new-media] platforms if those platforms become viable alternatives.”
The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, gives FSN exclusive rights to 56 regular-season men’s basketball games to be distributed via one or more national over-the-air networks and on FSN, with national or regional coverage.
The package also includes exclusive national cable rights to four regular-season women’s games annually. And FSN has exclusive rights to all nine games of the men’s conference tournament and the Pac-10 women's tournament.
In addition, the deal gives FSN’s three-channel Fox College Sports service the right to carry all games and events FSN televises, and it gives the national college-sports network access to the Pac-10’s extensive library of archived basketball events.
“We’re extremely pleased that Pac-10 Conference basketball will remain a fixture on FSN well into the next decade,” Thompson said in a prepared statement. “The conference is important to us and continues to play a vital role in both our national and regional programming, creating a solid core of quality product for FSN, FCS and all of our affiliated regional sports networks, especially, FSN Arizona, FSN Bay Area, FSN Northwest, FSN Prime Ticket and FSN West in Los Angeles.”
FSN’s Pac-10 college-football deal expires at the end of the 2006 season, but Rone said the programmer is currently in negotiations with the conference to renew the agreement.
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