BTN President Mark Silverman

Just got off the phone with Big Ten Network president Mark Silverman, we talked for about 30 minutes regarding everything BTN.

Last night there was a release issued stating that the BTN and Comcast would not be reaching an agreement for the start of the season.

Among the issues Silverman and I discussed.

• Nine of the 11 Big Ten schools will have the BTN available to students who are not going to the game or traveling. The only two that don’t are Illinois and Minnesota, and that is because Comcast controls the cable there.  BTN is trying to work out an agreement to get their games on at every Big Ten campus.

• We discussed the irony of Comcast ad reps calling the BTN to see if they want to advertise on Comcast channels. We see that in  our area on ABC27 all the time in recent weeks. So Comcast won’t pick up the network, but they are happy to take the BTNs money to advertise on Comcast channels. Silverman also stated that BTN is still showing up as being on Comcast in some areas, and on their channel guide.

• Silverman said that people “complaining” about the content on the BTN has died down in recent weeks, specifically when they released the 140 game basketball broadcast schedule.

• The relationship with ABC and ESPN is great right now, and there are natural ties with Silverman, Dave Revsine and Gerry DiNardo all working for ESPN/Disney at one time.

• The “overflow” channels are costly investments for BTN and DirecTV, but they needed to provide fans with the content all over.

• Silverman wondered why Comcast doesn’t put sports networks that they own on a sports tier in their pricing (note, we tried reaching Jeff Alexander of Comcast, he is our contact there and he hasn’t returned our call yet).

• Silverman feels that other conferences, such as the SEC, do not have the alumni base to be a “national” network distributed like the Big Ten. There have been rumors that Comcast would head up a SEC network in two years when their TV deal runs out. He feels that the BTN will succeed because of the alums all over the country and how rabid their are about their teams.

More on this in Saturday’s Sentinel.