One month after year-old CSTV completed the $7.5 million acquisition of the Official College Sports Network, the 150 college athletic departments in the online network are being gradually introduced to what’s available under the umbrella of the niche sports channel.
A daily college basketball call-in show, two documentaries on the University of Connecticut women’s basketball program, and excerpts from another documentary on University of Texas track coach Bev Kearney are among the programs that have appeared on the online network’s home, collegesports.com, and on a number of school sites over the past month.
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OCSN was rebranded collegesports.com as part of its acquisition.
The scattered programming is the first phase of an overall strategy to arm the member schools with a stronger technological backbone and make visitors aware of CSTV’s programming while preserving each site’s uniqueness, said CSTV President and CEO Brian Bedol
“You’ll see us, every week and every month, introduce unique and exclusive features that are available to the network sites,” Bedol said.
But CSTV is being careful to minimize its presence on the school sites, instead limiting the brand’s presence to collegesports.com while allowing member schools to use as much or as little CSTV programming as they want, Bedol said.
“We think that the independent feel of the sites as school-specific sites should be maintained,” Bedol said.
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| CollegeSports.com is the home of the online network formerly known as the Official College Sports Network. |
The enhanced multimedia content has long-term revenue implications for the collegesports.com network. Less than 1 percent of visitors to the schools’ sites pay for multimedia content as part of the $6.95 a month College Sports Pass subscription, according to Jeff Cravens, president of the network. Bedol said the subscription business will grow as the network gets visitors “comfortable with the online video [and audio] experience.”
The network of sites drew nearly 5 million unique visitors in March, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
For CSTV, now in 7 million households, the collegesports.com network allows the TV channel to increase exposure to programming for non-CSTV viewers and to better supplement programming for existing viewers. The latter materialized in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, when CSTV anchors referred viewers to the Georgia Tech (ramblinwreck.com) and Duke (goduke.com) sites.
“We see the experiences as being very complementary,” Bedol said.
