Big Ten Creates New Channel, More to Follow?

The Big Ten Conference announced recently that it will create its own cable tv channel to broadcast even more games and sports nationally.

The conference just signed a new 10-year TV deal with ESPN and ABC that will carry Big Ten football, men's and women's basketball and volleyball games starting in 2007.

The Big Ten Channel will be available to satellite and cable distributors nationwide and also will be available through the Internet, I-Pods, cell phones and other technologies, the league said.

DirecTV will offer the channel on its Total Choice package, which currently reaches about 15.4 million households, according to the news release.

"The Big Ten Channel will provide our conference the ability to strengthen both its brand and its long-term destiny as one of the leading academic and athletic conferences in the nation," said Big Ten Commissioner James E. Delany.

The new cable channel will carry not only football and basketball, but also such sports as soccer, tennis, swimming and diving and wrestling -- the so-called Olympic sports, the conference said.

This could lead to others conferences - most notably the Pac-10, Big 12, ACC and SEC following suit and offering up their own channels. It makes perfect sense. We have a insatiable hunger for sports in this country and with some of those on the fringe, like wrestling and volleyball, that have diehard fans it's only natural that these channels pop up.

The Big Ten Channel and the others who follow suit will be a win-win for the fans as well as the conferences and schools. It will bring huge amounts of money to the schools and allow the viewers to watch events they might miss otherwise.

For the football fan, the amount of games that may be available to watch is like manna from heaven, especially when the other conferences get on board and copy the Big Ten. It has already multiplied with the emergence of satellite and will grow even more with these individual outlets.

Rest assured the Big Ten is the first to jump on the cable TV bandwagon, but they definitely won't be the last.