UPDATE: Collegiate Images launches College Sports Channel

The broadband medium continues to open new distribution doors for content owners and Collegiate Images is the latest to walk through. Earlier today the company announced a deal with Dave.TV to create the College sports Channel.

The College Sports Channel on DAVE.TV will feature full-length games, video clips and highlights of various college sports games including football, basketball, volleyball and more. The College Sports Channel will kick off this March with DAVE.TV’s Interactive previews of the 64 seeded teams in the 2006 Men’s Basketball Tournament being held in late March and early April.

Dave.TV (Distributed Audio Video Entertainment Television) has more than 100 channels of content available through the Dave.TV portal. Consumers download a free software player for streaming to a PC or can also purchase the XPORT set-top box to watch programming on a TV set.

Under the terms of the agreement Dave.TV will have access to Collegiate Images library which is currently on Betacam SP tape. Dave.TV will digitize those tapes and encode the content for broadband delivery.

It s a pay-per-download product, says Rich Routman, Collegiate Images VP of business development. Certain content, however, will be free, like clips and a preview of the NCAA tournament.

Routman says the deal is the latest in a series of deals designed to expose Collegiate Images content to new distribution methods. TV, wireless, VOD and now the Internet are all part of Collegiate Images business model.

We re just putting our toe in the water with streaming of IPTV content, adds Routman. We want to see what platforms and companies emerge and take us to the next level.

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