UK explains Big Blue Madness TV controversy

Kentucky basketball fans were in a tizzy earlier this week when it was unclear where Big Blue Madness would be broadcast. It will be shown live on ESPN3, live cut-ins will be broadcast on ESPNU, and then at 11 p.m. a one-hour replay of the two-hour event will be shown on the SEC Network.

Earlier in the week, an ESPN spokesman explained how the network came to this decision. On Thursday, UK deputy athletics director DeWayne Peevy broke down more details of UK's end of the negotiation:

How did this transpire on your end?

I was heavily involved with helping our partners, with ESPN and the SEC Network, to understand the magnitude of it not being on television, because this is the first time they've had total rights. Getting it to the point where we'd have the replay at 11 (on the SEC Network) was a big undertaking. It was a week's worth of work to get them to understand, to get to a comfortable spot. Our priority was the fans who were in the arena. We didn't want to change our show to fit television, because those folks that camped out for four days deserve a magnificent show. We didn't want to jeopardize that.

The second thing was how can we make the largest number of UK fans be able to watch it? Their first thought was to place it on ESPN3 versus SEC Network Plus because Time Warner doesn't carry SEC Network Plus, and that's a lot of our fans. So we put it on ESPN3.

The last piece was what can we do for television? What happened was, last year they got hit with music royalty rights on a huge number, because of all the replays the show had. WKYT has had to pay royalty rights, but it's a local broadcast, not even statewide. National, international for ESPN3 and ESPN is a lot bigger figure.

What was done to handle the use of songs?

We first started talking about doing a show where you cut away during the player intros or go to a commercial and come back and show highlights. There was a fear that music being in the background and [announcers] talking over it might not be enough. No one wanted to risk doing it and finding out later it wasn't enough and coming back and getting hit [with royalties].

But I didn't want to narrow that down, which is what we would have had to do to simulcast it somewhere else. So basically what we settled on was let's do the ESPN3 show, a straight live look, no replays, no archives. It keeps the royalties limited. It's a lot more for national television. Then we'd have someone edit the show while it's going on, for a one-hour show for television, and have them put it on the SEC Network at 11.

Were you pleased with the result?

There were some really good concessions on [ESPN's] part. Hopefully we might have a better plan for how we do this next year. But I want to thank our fans, their interest. People get it. They definitely understand this is a huge deal. I think people have to understand this is a tougher ticket than any basketball game we have.

What will the overall reach be?

ESPN3 is 75 million homes, so this is gonna be the most people that have seen the real show. We'll have ESPN3, and in the ESPNU wraparound coverage, us and UConn are the featured schools, and UConn's broadcast is over just after 8, so most of the 8 to 9 window is gonna be Kentucky, where it used to be 8 to 12 teams. So we'll get a lot of coverage in the wraparound, we'll have ESPN3 and we'll have a one-hour show just for the same night. That's pretty good. The fans didn't get exactly what they wanted, but I think [ESPN] made some huge concessions to help Kentucky and help fans get what they needed.

Are some songs more expensive than others? Was there ever a thought about using less popular music?

That was the hardest part. That was not gonna work with our players, because then it'll be impacting the show. So if they're not picking what they want, then it's not good for the fans or good for recruiting or anything, and so I don't think we wanted to compromise that. We've limited guys on certain songs based on what they are to keep it a little fan friendly. But to go with non-popular songs wasn't going to work. Or elevator music. We actually talked about playing elevator music over it for people at home. For the people at home, I thought that would be more disturbing. That was an option they threw out.

Do you have a sense how much royalties fees are for songs, if they were broadcast on national television?

Some of them you might not be able to get cleared, depending on the popularity of it. It could be $5,000 or $10,000 per song in some places. In the middle of this discussion we got [ESPN] a list of the songs we knew at that point. We have one for every men's and women's basketball player, for [women's coach] Matthew Mitchell. And then the intro videos might have three or four songs on them. And you don't even have to play the whole thing [to have to pay royalties]. I've learned a lot about royalties.

The number kept escalating to the point where they said, 'Hey we're doing a lot for Kentucky.' You've got to think about it; the other SEC schools aren't getting this. We definitely shouldn't feel neglected here. They bent over backward to make it happen.

Follow Adam Himmelsbach on Twitter @adamhimmelsbach.