Pac-12 announces free streaming for fall Olympic sports

While many conferences keep lesser-watched Olympic sports behind a paywall, the Pac-12 is taking a different approach.

The conference announced that fall Olympic sports, including women’s soccer, men’s soccer, and volleyball, will stream for free on the Pac-12 YouTube channel.

These broadcasts should be fairly high quality. The conference says that the broadcasts will be supported by Pac-12 Enterprises’ centralized production capabilities.

Olympic sports are often an afterthought in the media rights deals that conferences sign. While many people care about college football and basketball, far fewer care about soccer and volleyball.

That results in these sports often being buried. Many conferences have streaming deals with ESPN. That is great for linear coverage, but the ESPN app is just not going to suggest college soccer to many people, especially with the many sports it is competing with.

YouTube is still very unlikely to recommend these sports to viewers. However, it does mean that niche audiences don’t need to pay for ESPN Unlimited or a lesser-known streaming service like FloSports to watch.

In addition to being a fan-friendly solution, this is seemingly a pretty savvy PR move for the Pac-12. There is little value in these sports to streaming services, especially with the plan to nationally televise all football games.

That differs wildly from the recent Mountain West approach. For the last few years, Mountain West Olympic sports have streamed for free on the Mountain West Network. This season, the Mountain West Network will become paid, with events streaming on the now-paid MW+ service, which is $10.99 a month.

Notably, it remains to be seen whether this will be the final form of this free streaming option for the Pac-12. In its release announcing the move, the Pac-12 notes, “The conference has been and continues to develop a direct-to-consumer platform for free-viewing opportunities. The fall season provides an opportunity to expand fan access while continuing to build toward additional ways for fans to engage with Pac-12 content in the future.”

That could mean that a future free streaming service looks more like the old Mountain West Network. Notably, after the shutdown of the Pac-12 Network, the Pac-12 continues to operate the FAST network, Pac-12 Insider. That network served as a streaming home for events still under the Pac-12 banner during the transition over the last few years, like Oregon State baseball games.

That network was not mentioned in this release.

For the moment, the Pac-12 will remain one of the few conferences to allow Olympic sports to stream for free.