SEC Network details revealed

The SEC Network will launch on Aug. 14 at 6 p.m. ET. After ironing out all the contracts, it looks like over 90 million people will have access to the network, and the network should meet its goal of having 75 million people actually subscribe. That’s a ton of people in line to receive 24-hour/365-day coverage of the nation’s most popular conference.

But it’s still unclear what the SEC Network is going to be. Can it be viable enough to broadcast some of the league’s biggest games on a consistent basis? Will it be more PR, more news, or more debate about the league?

Steve Spurrier has long been a proponent of paying players and also long been a proponent of running his mouth when his bosses probably prefer he didn’t. So when telling his players about the SEC Network being a massive financial success, he decided to throw some shade at the NCAA.

Spurrier has suggested before that the university should pay athletes, even going as far to say that coaches would be willing to pay players out of their own pockets. The SEC Network has made him uneasy since the beginning:

The SEC Network signed its last major cable provider on Monday with the addition of DirecTV, the satellite company announced in a joint press release. After signing giants Comcast, Dish Network and Time Warner earlier this year, DirecTV and its 20 million subscribers mark the second-biggest addition to the network’s lineup of providers.

The SEC Network lauded the addition, which was widely anticipated as the network’s launch date (Aug. 14) and first football game (Aug. 28) loom.

Everyone loves college football, but for now it has only been restricted to the planet Earth. All of that will change in November, when Tennessee native (and astronaut) Barry Wilmore assumes command of the International Space Station. He’s a huge Tennessee Tech fan (not a Vols fan, surprisingly) and if you’re going to be orbiting the Earth during football season, you better dang sure make some arrangements.

From The Tennessean:

The SEC announced a deal with Comcast in mid-July to put the network in nearly 50 million homes nationwide, and it just added two other major deals. Via SEC release:

That shrinks the number of major systems without the network:

The SEC Network is guaranteed to have a lot more viewers than it was yesterday. The network has signed a deal with Comcast, the largest cable distributor in the country. From the press release:

The SEC Network recently signed a deal with Cox Communications that brought it up to 27 million subscribers, but the deal with Comcast will nearly double that:

The SEC Network has unveiled a new commercial during SEC Media Days about the head football coaches of -- you guessed it! -- the SEC. Take a look, but also a listen:

There’s a man going around taking names

It’s a floor.

It’s a floor with modified elevation.

DISH subscribers, congratulations: your televisions will have the sights and sounds of Texas and the ESS EEE CEE this fall, as DISH announced a deal with the Longhorn Network and the SEC Network. So what does this mean for you, other cable viewers and the college football world as a whole? Here’s the deal.

Here’s ESPN’s announcement of the deal, complete with all the bullet points you need to know:

The SEC Network will officially launch on Aug. 21 2014 at 7 p.m. ET, ESPN’s Justin Connolly announced Thursday morning. When the channel is up and running, the SEC will be the third power conference to have its own network, joining the Big Ten and Pac-12.

Conference commissioner Mike Slive announced the first piece of original SEC Network programming this week, a documentary called The Book of Manning, which will debut this fall. The league will also have its own College Gameday-style show, and Connelly said the SEC will coordinate with ESPN and College Gameday to avoid overlaps or double bookings. College Gameday will still travel to SEC games, as well.

The great radio silence has ended: Paul Finebaum, the troll-god of SEC sports radio, will begin a new “multi-tiered” media deal with ESPN starting August 1st. Finebaum, a longtime stalwart of the Birmingham sports scene, will move to Charlotte as part of an upcoming role on the SEC Network and a larger role on ESPN’s television broadcasts.

Finebaum may not be familiar to a broader national audience, so I’ll help with a few comparisons.

The SEC and ESPN announced their long-awaited network Thursday, unveiling their plan to reporters in a star-studded event that featured all 14 SEC football head coaches.

The framework of the deal is relatively simple: The SEC and ESPN enter into a contract beginning in 2014 and running for 20 years. CBS retains the right to pick one SEC football game for broadcast every week at its typical 3:30 ET time slot, but the remainder of the games will be shown on an ESPN platform: ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, or the new SEC Network. The fledgling 24/7 college sports channel will show three football games every Saturday, as well as a number of basketball and baseball games and other conference-specific programming. In the end, SEC schools are going to make a boatload of money.

1. The SEC broke out the sexy bedroom lights for this: a full rack of them, all lined up against the curtain behind a forest of directors chairs on a tiered stage at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Atlanta. It felt less Birmingham formal and more Anaheim glossy in the room.

2. The announcement of Project X -- aka the SEC Network, produced in partnership with ESPN -- was a media event. A collection of journalists, ESPN execs, and all 14 SEC football coaches do not get together in a ballroom for surprises. ESPN president John Skipper and SEC commissioner Mike Slive summon audiences only to tell a bit of what you already know and to unveil what has been negotiated in advance. ESPN alone brought a platoon of message-ironing PR people. The schools had their own. At the end of the day, there may have been enough to play a nice zone against reporters, if not a full man-to-man defense.

The SEC formally announced its new 24-hour television network at noon ET Thursday in Atlanta. You should soon be able to re-watch the presentation via the embed above. Some notes below, and head to SEC blog Team Speed Kills for analysis on what comes next. Also, let us evaluate the poses of each SEC coach in Thursday’s photo op.

Further details, from the SEC’s FAQ:

With the SEC set to announce details of its new dedicated 24-hour television network Thursday, South Carolina head coach Steve Spurrier is taking the opportunity to again plead the case for paying players in the revenue sports.

The SEC’s television network will provide its member institutions with another boost in annual income, and it is an added revenue stream that has become almost a necessity in order to keep pace in the ever-escalating major-conference cash grab (via gogamecocks.com):

The SEC and ESPN were set to announce the SEC Network in Atlanta on Tuesday, but changed schedules due to Monday’s Boston tragedy.

We know just about everything we need to know for the moment about the network, however: it’s expected to launch just before the 2014 football season, it’ll be a 24-hour production, it’ll likely boost revenues for each SEC school near or beyond the Big Ten’s, it has a potential audience of 30 million homes even without adding schools, and it will air actual events of importance, including major football games on certain Saturdays.

The SEC will join the list of leagues with its own dedicated television channel, as Sports Business Daily reports that the league and ESPN will announce plans to launch a network in August of 2014 on Tuesday.

The conference that’s dominated college football for the past few years has been expected to get into the TV network game for a while, following in the footsteps of the Big Ten, who have been able to print money since the launch of the Big Ten Network. Although there is something called the SEC Network, its really just a loose affiliation of channels that will show ESPN-operated live broadcasts of games. This will be a full 24-7-365 channel based out of ESPN offices in Charlotte, and with the high demand for the league’s games, one can imagine subscribers across the South will be jump at the opportunity to spend the additional few dollars a month it will cost to get the network on one’s cable provider.

SEC commissioner Mike Slive said the conference will unveil their plans for a television network sometime in April, according to Pat Forde of Yahoo! Sports. The conference network has been in the planning stages for several years now, and will presumably put the SEC up with the Big Ten and Pac-12 in terms of television money.

The SEC Network will likely be a partnership between the conference and ESPN, with whom the SEC already has a strong relationship. It’s unclear how much more the SEC will stand to make as a result of adding Texas A&M and Missouri to the conference prior to the 2012 season, but considering the bump in population and available TV sets brought by the two schools, it could be significant.

The SEC Network is likely to become a reality before the 2014 football season as a partnership between the conference and ESPN, according to Sports Business Journal.

The report states that the TV rights issues still yet to be cleared are in the process of being streamlined for the potential all-SEC network, and that a August 2014 date is the tentative launch. Among the most pressing items in the way are the schools’ local TV rights, currently held by a variety of different companies. Those rights are good for at least one football game per season and 6-8 men’s basketball games, per SBJ: