Ahead of the Game: Celebrating Five Years of the ACC Digital Network

Production and distribution outfit has evolved with the volatile digital media landscape

Five years. It doesn’t sound like much, but It’s a lifetime in digital-media years. So, as ACC Digital Network celebrates five years of producing and distributing on-demand content for college-sports fans, it’s easy to forget how revolutionary the strategy was at the time of its launch.

Production and distribution outfit has evolved with the volatile digital-media landscape

In 2009, social video was basically YouTube (and that’s it), version 1 of the iPad hadn’t even been released, and live-streaming boxes like Roku and Apple TV were in their infancies. Today, the ACC Digital Network, a joint venture of Chicago-based digital-media company Silver Chalice and Raycom Sports, the longtime linear-television partner of the ACC, shines as a producer and syndicator of digital video content across multiple platforms, including theACC.com, the conference’s mobile and tablet app, various streaming and connected mobile and TV devices (such as Amazon Fire, Apple TV, Roku and Xbox), and the conference’s various social-media platforms.

“You had a very different-looking landscape,” says Matt Carstens, EVP for ACC Digital Network, who has been with Silver Chalice since 2009. “To our joint credit, Silver Chalice, Raycom Sports, and the conference looked at and wanted to invest in a high-quality, cost-efficient network that could be built and distributed digitally — not to interfere with or replace the television product but to complement what was going on in the television landscape around the ACC and continue to take advantage of the evolution of media and put the ACC athletes, teams, and sports on display for anyone who wanted to consume more of it.”

The ACC Digital Network has enjoyed many key milestones along the way in terms of content, distribution, and operations. The project has proved to be a catalyst for helping drive the conference’s member institutions to bolster their video-production and social-media staffs and put the conference at the forefront of technological developments in digital media over the past half decade. The ACCDN was one of the first content creators to strike a deal with YouTube where the video platform paid the network to produce content for it and the network was among the first apps available on the early editions of Apple TV.

“That was an accomplishment,” says Carstens. “[Apple] weren’t going to everybody and saying, ‘Hey, put your content here.’ They respected the quality, the offering, and asked us to join their platform.”

Conference digital networks are currently the norm across the country, but, from its birth, the ACC Digital Network has always been a bit of a different model: post-live rights, not games. ACCDN chose to build around on-demand programming to serve as a complement to the linear distribution of live game coverage.

When ESPN announced its partnership with the conference to create the ACC Network, which called for immediate creation of the digital-based ACC Network Plus and development of a cable-television network set for launch in 2019, many wondered about the future of the current iteration of the ACCDN. For the immediate future, it has almost no effect because the ACCDN side of the business will focus on continuing to build content around the games, while ACC Network Plus serves as a live-coverage extension of the ESPN3/WatchESPN platform.

“They’re really perfectly complementary offerings,” says Carstens, “and they also complement the new television network that will come, just like they complement today the ESPN offering in television as well as the Raycom Sports syndicated television package. They all work very well together.”

If anything, Carstens sees the new ESPN/ACC deal as a boon for the conference.

“The ACC is obviously recognized as one of Power Five conferences,” he points out, “but was, in my opinion, vastly inappropriately labeled as inferior to the Big Ten or the Pac-12 or the SEC because [it] didn’t ‘have a television-network deal.’ So the best thing is, this is putting [the ACC] back to where [it belongs] in the conversation and [corrects] what, to me, was an injustice it how [it was] labeled.”