Tag: pac-12 network

There are many sad realities attached to the failure of Pac-12 Network to lift the standing and revenue of the Pac-12 Conference to the level it needed. The overall failure of Pac-12 Network is embodied by USC and UCLA leaving for the Big Ten. If Pac-12 Network was hitting its targets, the Trojans and Bruins wouldn’t have felt the need to bolt.

One of the especially sad dimensions of the Pac-12 Network story is that the product itself — what you saw on the screen, getting beamed into your home, if you did have access to the P-12 Net — was really very good.

The problem with Pac-12 Network was never the production quality of a game or studio broadcast. All the people who were responsible for putting a good product on the air did an absolutely fantastic job. The network’s daily work gained industry respect, as The Athletic’s oral history — interviewing people associated with the network’s evolution — indicates:

Ryan Currier, senior vice president for engineering and products: We were the first network in the history of TV in the United States to launch a TV-everywhere product on the same day as a linear cable channel.

Adametz: There weren’t enough production trucks on the West Coast to produce the number of events we were supposed to do. We couldn’t do it as a traditional model. I remember meeting with Gary (Stevenson), pitching him on a different way to do it: using IP signals from all our campuses sent back to our production center, and doing multiple events simultaneously.

Adametz: ESPN came to see it. They were like, this can’t be real. How are you doing this? And we just showed them, because we were a not-for-profit, this is how we do it. We had a broadcaster fly in from Norway. They heard what we were doing and came and wanted to see it in person. It was pretty revolutionary.

Adamson: For all the criticism that I’ve heard over the years, no one’s ever criticized the product.

Still the number of events created issues. During the 2014-15 sports season, the Pac-12 Networks produced 850 events for linear TV. By comparison, the Big Ten Network reportedly produced 500. Another problem: While the six regional networks provided a local element to carriers and fan bases, it also caused problems. Notably, the channels all looked the same.

Moos: To some degree, (the regional networks model) had its assets, but it also had its liabilities. When you have an alumni base with a rural campus like Washington State, most of your alums aren’t in Pullman or even Spokane. There are a lot of them in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, and they weren’t able to get a lot of our content because it was primarily limited to the region.

Weiberg: The idea of 850 was a very large number.

Petix: It became like a weight around your neck as the years went on. There were just too many events that we were contractually obligated to air that simply didn’t generate revenue.

Young: What I think began to happen near the end of my tenure and accelerated after I left was the realization that expenses might be slightly out of control. That is to say where they chose to site the television station, the cost of renting that, the cost of going full-blown with all the equipment to broadcast all of these different games. The size of the capital investment and so forth was a little startling.

Petix: It all comes back to dollars. All roads were always leading back to, will we or won’t we with DirecTV?

It’s really sad, even annoying to a degree: All these talented people were doing a great job, but the business model and larger aims of the Pac-12 Network were woefully off the mark, as established by Larry Scott with no intervention from Pac-12 presidents. A great product did not make anything close to the money needed to truly elevate the conference.

What a waste.

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August 15, 2012. This was the first day on which Pac-12 Network programming was beamed to American television viewers.

A 10th anniversary reflects a certain degree of longevity and would therefore normally be celebrated in the television and media spheres. However, the Pac-12 Network’s 10th anniversary does not merit celebration. It is and has been exceptional in bad ways more than good.

To be sure, the network has done some good. It has promoted Olympic sports and women’s basketball. It has convinced a lot of athletes who grew up in the Pac-12’s geographical footprint to stay in the West for Olympic sports and women’s hoops. The Pac-12 has grown in strength, depth and quality as a women’s basketball conference, and that certainly ought to be celebrated.

Yet, in terms of making money for the conference, burnishing the league’s overall national reputation, and — centrally — boosting the football profile and track record of the conference, the Pac-12 Network has fallen far short.

USC and UCLA leaving for the Big Ten offer powerful and central proof of the Pac-12 Network’s failures.

To mark this 10th anniversary, The Athletic unrolled an oral history of the network.

There are many layers of the onion to peel away. Let’s start with this foundational point made by former Pac-12 deputy commissioner Kevin Weiberg, who had previously worked at another conference-specific entity, the Big Ten Network:

“I was really unsure about (the model), to be honest with you, because I had participated in the distribution effort for Big Ten Network with a major media company partner in Fox, and had we not had Fox as a partner, I’m not sure we would have achieved full distribution for Big Ten Network.”

The instability and lack of heft possessed by the Pac-12 Network contain multiple root sources. This is certainly one of them. Aligning with ESPN — more precisely, allowing ESPN to run the Pac-12 Network in exchange for larger and more pervasive distribution, with football and men’s basketball being the centerpieces — was not what Larry Scott wanted.

If the Pac-12 Network had chosen alignment with ESPN — either in 2012, when it was born, or in 2018, when the conference had a chance to reconsider its position — USC and UCLA would not have moved to the Big Ten. That central TV partner is something the network always lacked.

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