ACC Signs With ESPN

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ESPN won the TV rights to ACC football and basketball in a bidding competition with Fox Sports that was surprisingly close, industry sources say, and as a result made the conference several million more dollars.

The back-and-forth bidding, which reached its final stages last week at the league’s spring meetings in Amelia Island, Fla., drove up ESPN’s rights fee from initial projections of about $120 million a year to $155 million, sources said, providing the ACC with more than double the revenue it was receiving from its previous football and basketball contracts.

ESPN’s increase was in response to an unexpectedly strong pursuit by Fox Sports and sources familiar with the negotiations say the bidding was neck-and-neck last week.

The ACC broke from its spring meetings without announcing a new deal, and the conference said a formal contract had not been finalized. But industry sources pegged a pending deal with ESPN at $1.86 billion over 12 years .
That annual figure of $155 million dwarfs the average of $67 million the league was getting from its previous media deals, which expire at the end of the 2010-11 season, but falls well short of the $205 million a year that the SEC gets from its new 15-year deals with CBS and ESPN.

Raycom Sports, a 30-year partner with the conference, is expected to continue running the syndicated package of football and basketball by sublicensing those games from ESPN.

It is unclear what digital rights are included, but the deal is thought to be an all-encompassing arrangement between the ACC and ESPN that includes online and broadband.

With the new package, ESPN will continue to choose from the ACC’s full selection of football games for its Thursday night programming, as well as its Saturday afternoon and night games on ABC. The basketball package keeps the highly rated North Carolina-Duke game on ESPN, and the network typically broadcasts ACC action on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights during the week, in addition to Saturdays. It remains to be seen if FSN will continue its Sunday night basketball programming by purchasing those games from ESPN in the new contract.

To win the rights, ESPN had to stave off Fox, which sent its big guns to Amelia Island to make its final bid. Fox was represented by Chase Carey, the chief operating officer for parent company News Corp.; Fox Sports President Ed Goren; and Fox Sports Networks President Randy Freer. Their bid included over-the-air and cable components, with a game of the week on Fox Sports and other games throughout the week on FX and FSN.

http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/stories/2010/05/17/daily2.html?jst=b_ln_hl
 
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