There are many sad realities attached to the failure of Pac-12 Network to lift the standing and revenue of the Pac-12 Conference to the level it needed. The overall failure of Pac-12 Network is embodied by USC and UCLA leaving for the Big Ten. If Pac-12 Network was hitting its targets, the Trojans and Bruins wouldn’t have felt the need to bolt.
One of the especially sad dimensions of the Pac-12 Network story is that the product itself — what you saw on the screen, getting beamed into your home, if you did have access to the P-12 Net — was really very good.
The problem with Pac-12 Network was never the production quality of a game or studio broadcast. All the people who were responsible for putting a good product on the air did an absolutely fantastic job. The network’s daily work gained industry respect, as The Athletic’s oral history — interviewing people associated with the network’s evolution — indicates:
Ryan Currier, senior vice president for engineering and products: We were the first network in the history of TV in the United States to launch a TV-everywhere product on the same day as a linear cable channel.
Adametz: There weren’t enough production trucks on the West Coast to produce the number of events we were supposed to do. We couldn’t do it as a traditional model. I remember meeting with Gary (Stevenson), pitching him on a different way to do it: using IP signals from all our campuses sent back to our production center, and doing multiple events simultaneously.
Adametz: ESPN came to see it. They were like, this can’t be real. How are you doing this? And we just showed them, because we were a not-for-profit, this is how we do it. We had a broadcaster fly in from Norway. They heard what we were doing and came and wanted to see it in person. It was pretty revolutionary.
Adamson: For all the criticism that I’ve heard over the years, no one’s ever criticized the product.
Still the number of events created issues. During…
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