A pair of Ohio legislators are pushing a bill to stop college games from being telecast only on streaming services. The focus is on O$U football games that are available only on Peacock, but the prohibition would apply to all Ohio universities and all sports. That means MAC games might not be shown only on ESPN+, which means they might not be available to fans on TV at all. Here is an article about the legislation: https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2024/08/28/as-college-foot... /

While I'm for making games available to fans who don't have access to or can't afford cable or internet, the legislators apparently haven't thought about the legislation's potential affect on fans of non-B10 schools. If it weren't for ESPN+, there would be few televised MAC football games in September and October, and practically no televised MAC games in other sports. This would be detrimental to those who, for one reason or another, can't attend games. It doesn't look like the legislation will go anywhere in the lame duck session of the General Assembly after the election, but it's likely to come up again next year.

Shocking that all they would presume to care about is how it impacts OSU and nobody else. I'm totally blown away. Never could have seen this coming. Other sarcastic superlatives.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think the important word here is that the bill keeps schools from signing ". . .exclusive presentation deals with streaming services. . ."

I don't think the MAC's deal is exclusive to ESPN+; in fact, I think the deal is actually with ESPN directly for mid-week games, and that the remaining inventory goes to ESPN+.

No idea how the legislation's actually written, but I suspect it would only apply to deals that blackout games from local markets in favor of streaming options.

All that said, in an era where the means of funding college sports is evolving super rapidly, I find it super dumb that state legislatures are trying trying to pass legislation that limits revenue streams.

The Peacock deal is part of B10's deal with NBC, so it's not exclusive with Peacock. NBC gets to choose which game(s) are on Peacock during a given week. I think the legislators' intent is to not have O$U games shown exclusively on a streaming service, period. It's also interesting that they didn't include Browns and Bengals games in the legislation. Their fans are probably just as pissed as O$U fans when the NFL allows their games to be shown exclusively on Peacock or another streaming service. When games first showed up on cable in the 1980s, the NFL required that they also be shown on over-the-air stations in the teams' home markets. Not anymore. Something like that would be a good solution for the streaming issue, but don't expect it to happen.

Of course the state legislature would do something for the benefit of O$U that would totally screw over the rest of the college football fans in the state. 🙄

God bless the politicians worrying about the important issues like this!


sigh....

Beat me to it. Of all thing things to worry about. How about getting rid of the $8000 per stuent per year private school subsidy? How about a city that wants to get rid of single use plastic bags do that? I could go on and on but you get the point.

Funny how our state legislature is all about free enterprise and capitalism until it isn’t. And this has zero to do with anything other than people getting pissed when they don’t get the OSU game on free live broadcast TV.

They just got done dealing with making sure high school games take cash! And setting price limits.