A-10 Rethinking CSTV Deal

Temple Athletic Director Bill Bradshaw has informed OwlsDaily.com that the Atlantic 10 will consider changes to its CSTV contract when league athletic directors hold their annual meeting later this month. The much-maligned television deal gave the A-10 an immediate cash reward last year, but resulted in far less TV exposure for men’s basketball.

In January 2006, the A-10 announced new TV deals with ESPN and CSTV, the fledgling cable sports network that had just been purchased by CBS. The ESPN deal (through 2009-10) included eight men’s basketball games on ESPN/ESPN2, six on ESPNU, and the A-10 title game on ESPN/ESPN2. Everything else went to CSTV.

In essence, the CSTV deal (through 2010-11) brought an end to the A-10 Network, which had handled television coverage for league games for two decades. The CSTV deal also includes broadcast rights for non-conference home games.

Switching from self-produced coverage to CSTV wasn’t a difficult decision for the A-10, according to Bradshaw, who is chairman of the league’s television committee.

“It was clearly the best financial option that we had,” Bradshaw said. “The Atlantic 10 had been paying for all the local TV and the Atlantic 10 package for years, to the tune of about a million dollars. So when CSTV took over, they also took over responsibility of paying for the production of those games. So it was a win-win.”

Until the season started, that is, when it became win-win-loss -- as in lost TV appearances for everybody in the league.

Last summer, when CSTV approached cable operators in A-10 markets (like Comcast in Philadelphia), many of those operators balked at paying a premium for league games that the A-10 used to give them almost for free. The negotiations between CSTV and various cable operators dragged into January, when a limited broadcast schedule was finally announced.

While there were plenty of games on CSTV last season, and live games available on the internet, the overall exposure for the A-10 was cut drastically. CSTV has far fewer subscribers than the local stations that used to carry the A-10 Network package.

“There was no guarantee about exposure,” Bradshaw said of the CSTV deal. “They weren’t able to clear the local stations.”

The A-10 is not alone in its frustrations. The Mountain West Conference has endured the same exposure problems since inking a deal with CSTV.

Bradshaw said the A-10 is now dealing with the issue, and there will be some kind of resolution in the coming weeks and months.

“We’re negotiating right now with CSTV to make sure that we’re on a lot more next year,” he said. “That’s in the process right now. We have an athletic director’s meeting in May and the Presidents are going to be talking about it in June. As chairman of the TV committee, I’ll be making a recommendation to the Presidents in June as to what we want to do, if we want to change the agreement that we have now, if we want to give local rights back to the schools, whatever that decision may be.”