By now most of you have heard of the Big Ten Network, the new television network that will cover only Big Ten Conference games. I like the idea, but there's a few things that immediately turned me off to the Big Ten Network. First was this commercial/advertisement that I first saw while in Michigan last year:
Now, I'm all for cheesy sports montages, and I can get past the lame use of clips from the movies Good Will Hunting and the ESPN special, A Season on the Brink, but the commercials did very little to get me motivated to watch and support their new network. All it did was show parts of each Big Ten school's campus, a couple of very old game highlights, and some inspiring background music. What they didn't say, was that the Big Ten Network will only be available on DirecTV, DISH Network, and AT&T (who gets AT&T television??). Despite the network's success with satellite providers, major cable companies such as Charter, Comcast and Time Warner Cable have yet to reach an agreement to broadcast the channel. The reported subscriber rates requested by the Big Ten Network is $1.10 per subscriber per month within the eight-state Big Ten region and carriage on an expanded basic tier. Outside the eight-state Big Ten region, the network is reportedly asking for $0.10 per subscriber per month and carriage on a digital basic tier. Currently, major cable companies have declined to carry the network on their basic tier as the Big Ten requests, which has led to a situation similar to those of the NFL Network and broadband network ESPN360 where fans will miss many live games because their cable provider does not carry the Big Ten Network.
I understand that it needs to start somewhere, and this is exactly how CSTV started and became popular, but at the same time, CSTV is now only a PPV channel on non-satellite cable providers. The Big Ten Network will never be able to outpay what ESPN (and they boys at Disney) does for the Big Ten television contract. So at best, the Big Ten Network will only get 3 or so football/basketball games per school, and rely on broadcasting all of the other sports. Basically, it's CSTV for the Big Ten with a few football and basketball games thrown in.
The second major issue that I have with the Big Ten Network has to do with their claim that "all of its live events will be produced in HDTV. The Big Ten Network will produce more original High-Definition programming than any new network in television history." This sounds great right? If only their version of HD actually looked like other versions of HD. While watching the Appalachian St. vs. Michigan game at a friend's house who has DirecTV (gonna be a while until I can safely talk about that game by the way), we began flipping the channel back and forth from ESPN to the Big Ten Network. It was a bit obvious that the quality of the ESPN picture was a lot better than that on the Big Ten Network, just like ESPN is way better than Fox Sports in terms of broadcast quality, it just is. But even worse, when ESPN was relaying the half time highlights, it looked ten times better than the actual game on the Big Ten Network!
So what's that big deal? It's just annoying when people try to do things like this and the result is the each school's fan base possibly not being able to see 2-3 games of their favorite team. In my case, I think it's a bit ridiculous that a national power like Michigan won't have every one of their games nationally televised, let alone in the state of Michigan. I've got a bad feeling that all of the big conferences are going to try something like this, and we're going to be stuck either paying for every conference channel or only getting regional games. I kind of just like it the way it is.
