Fans tuning in to watch UNLV take on Air Force in men’s basketball on Saturday could be part of history.
Five UNLV athletes will stream the game on their personal social channels as part of a groundbreaking new partnership between the Mountain West Conference, Creator Sports Network, and NIL network Opendorse.
Rather than placing its additional sports inventory on a smaller cable network or subscription streaming service owned by an external partner, the Mountain West chose to keep certain windows in-house within its broadcast rights deals. Now, the conference is allowing its inventory to serve as a testing ground for an Athlete Rights Window, in step with CSN’s vision for a future in which multi-channel, creator-led streams revolutionize the experience of watching sports.
“The ethos of this new generation is interactive. They want to do things and have an experience and have something that’s happening in a two-way conversation,” Javan Hedlund, a senior associate commissioner at the MWC, told Awful Announcing. “Instead of trying to get the audience to come to you, we’ll put the content where the audience already is, and how they’re interacting. That’s really what kind of opened up the creator distribution window.”
Creator Sports Network is a pioneer of the Creator Rights Window model, and last fall struck a deal with Brazil’s top soccer championship.
Under this new agreement, CSN will take a live game feed from the conference, and merge it with a feed of a creator or “host” as well as a scorebug. The vertical broadcast will stream live on the athletes’ personal Instagram and TikTok accounts.
“We’ve heard this sentence for so long: The athlete is a media company,” said CSN founder Barrick Prince. “Well, now, the athlete is the distributor.”
For Saturday’s game, UNLV athletes Al Green, Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn, Howie Fleming, Kimani Hamilton, and Tyrin Jones will be the first to try the new model. The following Wednesday, three more athletes will stream a UNLV-Colorado State women’s basketball game.
Athletes are recruited through Opendorse’s “opportunity board” through its partners on MWC campuses. Opendorse will help athletes find an on-site “helper” to manage their social accounts and bring their streams to life.
“Getting a college athlete to drive tune-in on the Mountain West channels … we would love that to happen,” Opendorse founder Blake Lawrence told Awful Announcing. “Naturally, they’re busy. They’re going to class, they’re getting on a bus, they’re traveling. And they’re not promoting games.
“So how do you get an athlete to let their entire audience know that they are playing tonight? What I love about this is it skips that step. It just says, ‘I’m playing tonight. I’m live.'”
Athletes will receive an NIL payout for distributing games through their social channels.
Prince said he could see family friends, team managers, or even game broadcasters serving as “hosts” of these streams in the future.
“Most of the time, the audience is coming to see a creator and interact with a specific [talent],” Prince explained. “In this case, they’re actually following the athlete and interacting with the athlete. They can’t interact with them like they would a normal creator. We’re trying to shorten that gap a little bit.”
The deal will be reevaluated after the spring sports schedule, but all three partners are enthusiastic about a future together. Particularly as the MWC gets set to welcome three additional football programs this summer in UTEP, Northern Illinois, and North Dakota State.
The conference hopes its innovative approach to broadcast distribution, which also includes an OTT app and other FAST channel partnerships, will help attract top athletes and staff.
“We chose not to go with some of the other platforms that a lot of the other conferences have, because we are trying to drive revenue back to institutions,” Hedlund explained. “And if you look at some of our direct-to-consumer that’s coming up, the more subscribers you have for that institution, the more revenue that’s going back to the campuses.”
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is an Editorial Lead at Awful Announcing overseeing digital content and special projects. He lives in Phoenix and has covered sports media for Awful Announcing since 2023.