Interesting, but I don't see what the ACC has to gain from an alliance with the Pac-12, mainly because of the 4 hour time difference. I heard Tech mentioned once, but I don't remember now what Canzano said, and I don't want to try to find it. Do you remember?
It looks like though, that ESPN is pretty much in charge, and it's all about the money.
So lets look at how USC & UCLA helps the BTN, and that’s key to their adding USC and UCLA, who play in the second-largest designated media market in the U.S. (as per Nielsen’s 2021-22 DMA rankings, the LA DMA’s estimated 5,735,230 TV homes was second only to NYC’s 7,452,620).
So a way to calculate a conservative UCLA-USC LA market impact for the BIG10 Network is as follows: keep the in-footprint and out-of-footprint fee estimates at $1.50 and $0.10, assume that BTN will receive a similar percentage of penetration in LA as it does nationally (54.3/122.4=42.7 percent), and assume that that 42.7 percent all already had BTN at the out-of-market price (so going from $0.10 to $1.50). That gives 42.7 percent home penetration * 5.73 million homes = 2.45 million homes, which multiplied by $1.40 is $3.43 million extra per month, or $41.16 million extra per year. I say this is conservative becuase I can see the whole state of california demanding BIG10 Network becuase UCLA-USC will be on the BIG10 Network.
So how can the PAC12 on the ACC Network help the ACC. Well ESPN & ACCN share profits 50/50. However ESPN will front the cost of the Tier1-Tier3 rights. ESPN may or may not sublicense PAc tier 3 rights to BALLy RSN, they could start a ESPN+ network and maybe produce the sam income that the PACN brought them. But for the ACCN. Having Tier2 games on the ACCN and taking the .10 subscriber fee from out of footprint rate to the 1.00 in foot print rate will add a ton of money, not to mention the extra advertising dollars that will come to the network. Can you imagine if the ACCN took the entire PAC10 Market (not counting San Diego & Las Vegas) 11.9M homes and were able to get 50 percent to watch or subscribe at the in footprint rate that would be 5.95M homes at an incerease of .90 cents. which woud be 5.35M in monthly revenue for an annual payout of 64.26M that would before new advertisement dollars and is really a conservative estimate I have heard it may be as high as 75-80% of that number and I can see that ESPN may charge 1.50 rate for that same content. SO I think it is a no brainer for the ACC to allow ESPN to put PAC12 games on that network. The real number from the impact may well be higher. ACCN becomes more attractive carry in the entire states of California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Utah, Colorado when they carry PAC12 content, and some of those entre states could certainly wind up as in-footprint ACCN as well.
However it is not going to make the 15 ACC schools a ton of money we are talking 1-10M increase after profits are split with ESPN and the member schools. However if you are the ACC and you can't renegotiate your TV contract until the next look-in which is 2026, getting an extra 5-10M on top of your current media payout certianly doesn't hurt.
— Number of Pac-12 markets with at least one million homes in 2021, per Nielsen DMAs (with national ranking):
No. 6 Bay Area - 2.6M homes
No. 11 Phoenix - 2.1M homes
No. 12 Seattle - 2.0M homes
No. 16 Denver - 1.7M homes
No. 21 Portland - 1.3M homes
No. 27 San Diego - 1.1M homes
No. 30 Salt Lake City - 1.1M homes
If they added UNLV or the Las Vegas market (it is under 1M at 833K) they come in at #40 you have a great media market to sell to ESPN and With regard to Fresno State, Central Valley is home to 6.5 million people — it’s the equivalent of Seattle and Portland combined — and a good portion of them are Bulldogs fans.
