The article below has some interesting details about the MAC deal. What I found interesting was the stuff about the MAC Digital Network going away. Apparently, the MAC sold all their rights to ESPN, so as soon as the MAC schools have their production capabilities up to ESPN standards, the games will move from the MAC Digital Network to the MAC Network on ESPN-3.

Our deal is quite similar--so I wonder if we have to the option of improving our production capabilities at the school level and improving the ESPN-3 coverage of our baseball and other olympic sports (maybe soccer?). Anyway, this is part of what the article has to say about the new deals digital aspects.


As mentioned, the plan is to eventually move all schools over from their current streaming services to ESPN3. The school's sites will get to host an ESPN3 player and all game streams will come through via ESPN3. But this is still a ways down the road.

In order for this to work, the plan is to over the course of the next three to four years, get infrastructure in place to allow schools to produce the broadcasts of these events themselves and stream them on ESPN3. Ken Mather told me an audit has been done to determine what level technologically each program's broadcast capabilities are currently at to determine which three or four schools will immediately begin working to produce content for ESPN3.

The way Mather explained it to me, this does mean that ALL schools will be required to start streaming men's and women's basketball games through the service, almost immediately. Meaning, if they're going to be streaming MAC basketball games, they can't do it through their own service (many of which were free, including the MAC's own digital network) and will have to go through ESPN3, with the eventual goal that all of the games they would stream (think volleyball and wrestling meets) would also go through ESPN3 by the end of that four-year ramp up and training period. (We'll have a more in-depth examination of this later).


http://www.hustlebelt.com/2014/8/19/6045...pn-tv-deal

So ESPN is acting to preserve their middleman position in the event of a new, non-cable-channel-centric era.

This creates a (new) disadvantage for Fox, but I think they could fairly easily partner up with MLB's streaming arm.