I’m being lazy here. I could email the ACC and Comcast to ask the PR folks what’s up with regard to the ACC Network. I don’t feel like wasting my time waiting for the canned responses.
Blah, blah, blah, continuing to explore any and all avenues for discussion, blah, blah, blah, we’re hoping both sides can find a happy medium, blah, blah, blah.
Nothing is happening. That’s the news.
We played three ACC football conference games the opening week of the season to put pressure on the cable companies to add ACC Network, to no avail.
We played seven ACC hoops games in early November to put pressure.
No dice.
We added two more games to the conference schedule, by the way.
Crickets chirping.
Then announced an expansive baseball schedule. Nobody cares about college baseball.
This is going to drag now.
It’s going to be the eve of the 2020 football season before there’s any need for Comcast to even care, and it’s more likely to stretch into 2021, given current contractual arrangements between Disney, ESPN’s parent company, and the cable carrier, the nation’s largest, with more than 21 million subscribers, including big numbers in the ACC footprint up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
This means two things: if you want ACC Network, your best bet is streaming (good news for, among others, YouTube TV), and the league isn’t going to make the money it could be without access to those 21 million Comcast folks.
Which is why you see all those three-minute mini-infomercials for mirrors, night vision goggles and the bike stand that you can mount on a wall in your apartment.
There’s so, so, so much inventory in terms of ad offerings, and the big boys aren’t snapping it up with nobody but a handful of diehards watching.
It’s hard to believe that heads aren’t rolling over how bad this rollout has been executed.
Story by Chris Graham
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