The University of Maine’s women’s basketball game against Purdue University in the Tip-Off Tournament at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor at 5 p.m. Friday will be among the first events to be live-streamed on ESPN3 after America East announced on Thursday an 11-year extension of its media rights with the network.
ESPN3 is ESPN’s live multi-screen online sports network, accessible on computers, smartphones, tablets and streaming devices through WatchESPN.
The host school will be responsible for producing all men’s and women’s basketball games.
“This will provide a tremendous increase in our visibility on the ESPN platform,” said UMaine director of athletics Karlton Creech. “We will gain more and more momentum across the country and at the University of Maine.
“This will be tremendously advantageous not only for America East but also for each institution,” Creech added.
ESPN3 aired a total of 18 America East men’s and women’s basketball games last season, according to Matt Bourque, America East’s senior associate commissioner for external relations.
The ones that weren’t on ESPN3 were streamed on the America East website but the quality of the productions varied by school.
Now all of them will be aired on ESPN3 and the network has established guidelines that will ensure a higher quality production.
“It has completely changed the format from a videoboard format to a national platform,” explained Sam Hallett, who was hired by the University of Maine this year as director of digital content.
“The biggest things will be the exposure we get with an ESPN brand and the increase in production quality,” said Bourque. “Instead of having just one or two cameras, you’re looking at four or five cameras. It will be very similar to the production you’ll see when Duke plays Kentucky on ESPN.”
Each member institution will have to spend money to upgrade production quality but Bourque said the rights fees paid by ESPN to America East, which were not divulged, will be divided among the nine member schools to help defray production costs.
Bourque said the schools are making the transition at their own pace but pointed out that the University of Maine is “already up and running. Maine has really taken the lead in this.”
Hallett, who had a similar job at Canisius University in Buffalo, New York, last year, said work-study students will handle production of the games and he would like to eventually devise a curriculum at the school to develop a pool of students to handle production.
“I had 25 students at Canisius and they earned credits,” he said.
Bourque said America East and ESPN hope to work together to broadcast other sports in the near future.
Creech credited America East commissioner Amy Huchthausen and her staff for making the effort possible.
“Amy and her staff have worked extremely hard on this for almost two years. The result is a direct correlation of their hard work,” said Creech.