SEC Commissioner Mike Slive told the press last week that the league will wait until after the Madness of March to be over before making the formal announcement concerning the new SEC TV Network which is aiming at an August 2014 kickoff date.
Look for an announcement from Slive’s office in the middle of April. The new network is expected to be a big financial windfall for the SEC as well as for ESPN which is expected to share a joint ownership stake with the league in the new network enterprise.
Although the launching of the new network was supposed to be a secret, it has been widely talked about in the press for several months. The proposition seems to be a win-win situation with no real objections arising anywhere.
The Sports Business Journal reported back in September that the deal would be announced just as soon as the league completed its re-purchase of the “third-tier” television rights that have historically been the property of the leagues’ individual schools, which they then contracted out to the highest bidder.,
There will be some tough competition from Cable and Satellite providers, however, no one really expects the new network to be anything short of a massive financial windfall for the SEC and its member schools……most of which are already rolling in wealth.
Yahoo claims that the network “is expected to yield tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue” for the league. Sporting News speculates that the deal could be worth over a billion dollars to the league over the next decade.
Eric Hyman, the athletic director of the Texas A&M Aggies, speaks of the new financial “flexibility” that he expects from the new network and the lucrative TV contracts that will come out of it. “It’s a game changer, it separates us.” “All of our teams will get exposure like they’ve never had before. The exposure that we’re going to get is going to be phenomenal.”
The new SEC TV Network has been bandied about for several years now by SEC officials and college administrators. They have been watching, enviously, the success of the Big Ten Network and thinking about all of that money….not to mention the added exposure that the member Universities will be receiving once the new network is up in running.
Of course, the real winners out of all this are the fans of the SEC.
