CSTV finding niche
Charter carries college network
Bill Doyle Tuning In
Brian Bedol wishes to make one thing perfectly clear about his fledgling College Sports Television Network (CSTV).
“We don’t have ESPN envy,” Bedol insisted.
Bedol, Steve Greenburg and Chris Bevilacqua launched CSTV in April 2003, and the cable home of such previously ignored sports as lacrosse, wrestling and Division 3 football has slowly spread into 10 million households, including those in Worcester County. Charter Communications began offering CSTV Tuesday on Channel 318 as part of its digital sports tier.
CSTV still reaches only a fraction of the audiences of the many ESPN networks, but Bedol isn’t complaining.
CSTV carved out such a good niche, ESPN decided to launch its own college sports network, called ESPNU, on March 4. Bedol jokingly accused ESPN of becoming the worldwide follower in sports.
Bedol and Greenburg also founded the Classic Sports Network and later sold it to ESPN, which renamed it ESPN Classic. Bedol insists he has no plans to sell CSTV to ESPN, but if the price were right, you have to believe he would eventually.
Bedol insists both CSTV and ESPNU can survive, even though other networks televise most of the major college sports of football and basketball.
“There are over 150,000 events in college athletics every year,” Bedol explained. “If you figure a typical channel can broadcast somewhere around 200 a year, you’d need somewhere around 750 channels to cover them.”
Yes, but do viewers want to watch them all? Probably not. So CSTV and ESPNU must try to turn a profit by televising college games not already shown on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, TBS, ESPN, ESPN2, NESN, FSN, etc. Viewers in Worcester and Bethlehem, Pa., may tune in Sunday’s Lehigh at Holy Cross men’s basketball game on CSTV, but can enough highly desired college-educated viewers be lured nationally to satisfy advertisers? Bedol says yes. Besides, CSTV isn’t paying the high rights fees the major networks do to televise sporting events so it doesn’t have to generate as much revenue.
The network will also air the Holy Cross women’s basketball home game against Colgate at 2 p.m. Feb. 19.
CSTV subsidizes its television programming with income earned from operating the largest online merchandise store in college sports and 180 Web sites for conferences and colleges, ranging from Notre Dame to Ohio State to USC to the Patriot League. Combining its network and broadband business, including audio, video, animated graphics and statistical feeds, CSTV covered more than 20,000 games last year.
CSTV was the first network to regularly televise regular-season action in college hockey, baseball, wrestling and lacrosse.
“Lacrosse fans have been so underserved,” Bedol said, “that while they’d love to see their own school play, they’d love to see any lacrosse game at all. In football and basketball, generally the interest is limited to the fans of those specific schools because there are so many games on.”
Turn on CSTV, and you’ll liable to see rugby, ultimate Frisbee, even the National College Debate Championships, or as one participant called them, “the Final Four for geeks.” Bedol hopes they will catch on the way curling and short-track speed skating did during the Olympics.
“The key to great television,” Bedol said, “is not just providing what people know they’re going to like. It’s providing viewers with the surprises that they didn’t realize would be so entertaining.”
Bedol, 46, isn’t some frustrated former lacrosse star or college debater, but he was an avid hockey fan when he attended Boston University. In fact, he was at the Boston Garden for the Beanpot during the Blizzard of ’78 and hung onto the back of a snowplow part of the way back to his dorm.
Bedol was involved in starting MTV “from the Bob Uecker seats” and had a hand in developing Nick at Nite and Court TV. Not all of his subsequent plans paid off.
“I promise you I’ve thought of a lot of really bad ideas,” Bedol said. “I just block them out.”
While he sought funding for a shopping network based on direct mail catalogues, Time Warner combined with Spiegel to beat him to the punch. The concept never reached the air, however.
Bedol wasn’t surprised ESPN decided to launch ESPNU.
“ESPN does professional sports extremely well,” Bedol said, “but they’re the general store. We’re as different from ESPN as Starbucks is from Dunkin’ Donuts. The only thing they have in common is they both serve coffee. We’re very proud to be exclusively and solely in college sports.”
Bedol wonders if ESPN has sold its soul by televising poker to achieve ratings.
“They have a lot of very hungry mouths to feed,” Bedol said. “Poker gets big ratings, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect the kinds of values that college sports do. In poker, the great reward is for whoever is the best at deception. We don’t look at Fossilman (Greg Raymer), as terrific of a poker player as he is, as being necessarily the appropriate role model for athletes.”
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