Pac-12 Network Combines with AliSports to Broadcast Pac-12 Global Initiative

SHANGHAI— A typical Harvard men’s basketball game at Lavietes Pavilion garners a few hundred fans, and swells in Ivy play. But for the Crimson’s season opener against Stanford in Shanghai on Saturday (Friday at 11 PM EST), the team will be performing for a much larger audience.

In the second year of the it’s Globalization Initiative, the Pac-12 has partnered with the Alibaba Group and its sports branch, AliSports, to broadcast the contest all over China along with the thousands of fans expected to watch the game in person.

Broadcasting games online is nothing new for the Crimson or Cardinal. Since 2013, the Ivy League has operated the Ivy League Digital Network (ILDN), which streams thousands of Ancient Eight events every year. The Pac-12 operates on an even larger scale, operating the Pac-12 Networks, which it describes as “the first and only sports media company owned by its 12 universities.”

According to AliSports CEO Zhang Dazhong, who spoke at a press conference on Thursday at Shanghai Disneyland Hotel alongside FUSC Vice President and Secretary-General Liguo Yang and Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott, it is the strength of the Pac-12 media network that inspired the partnership between the two organizations.

Alisports, which launched in September 2015, currently has agreements with the FIFA World Cup, the NFL, the International Boxing Associaton, and Ocean Sports Entertainment, which promotes match poker in China, but Alibaba has always had a connection to Ivy League Sports, as Alibaba Vice Chairman Joe Tsai is a former Yale lacrosse player.

While fans in the U.S. will be able to watch the Pac-12 China Game on ESPN, a subsection of the Disney Company, Chinese fans will have a variety of viewing options.

“This game is going to be widely viewed, not only by what we expect to be a very energetic audience at the Mercedes-Benz Arena on Saturday, but its going to be broadcast on television around the globe thanks to our partners at AliSports who are going to be producing the broadcast that is going to be distributed throughout China,” Scott said. “Fans will be able to see the game on CCTV, provincial television channels like Beijing TV as well as several digital channels like Alibaba’s Youku service and the FUSC’s Jing Sports.”

Jing Sports, like the Ivy League Digital Network, is a growing online platform for the Federation of University Sports of China (FUSC) to broadcast games throughout the country and grow a greater fan base for its teams.

Yang spoke of FUSC’s visit to the Pac-12’s media home base where they saw how a major sports network is run. The FUSC representative spoke of the impressiveness of the advanced equipment and management structure at the Pac-12 that he hopes FUSC can emulate. Yang noted that Jing Sports currently produces over 400 events worth of content, but that their major issue is in content promotion—which they hope AliSports can help with.

“For the population under 45, they don’t watch TV, only online,” Yang said through a translator. “Even though our Jing Sports isn’t very popular, it has a good penetrating rate.”

For Jing Sport’s largest coverage of a marathon event in China, the platform garnered five new members every five minutes, a rate it hopes it can sustain.

“Among students, among parents of students, we have a big audience for Jing Sports,” Yang said. “We should learn more from Ali and Pac-12 on how do we make better use of media to spread the news.”

Much like Jing Sports and the Chinese sports broadcast array of networks is growing, the Ivy League is looking to grow its reach on the screen. While the men’s basketball team is in China, Harvard Athletics announced that 15 Harvard basketball games would be televised across four networks—American Sports Network, ESPN3, New England Sports Network, and ONE World Sports. Ten men’s contests will be broadcast—including Crimson Madness, which took place on Oct. 14—and five women’s games. In total, 23 games will be broadcast on ILDN.

While television networks like ESPN3 and NESN may draw fans away from the paid ILDN platform, Ivy League Executive Director Robin Harris, who is attending the game in Shanghai, believes that getting more screen time for the league in any capacity can only help the ILDN.

“[ESPN3] is a terrific opportunity to feature the network and showcase it to fans that haven’t subscribed yet,” Harris said to The Crimson in 2014. “The hope is that fans will tune in and watch…and then say, ‘Wow, this is great production, I’m going to subscribe [to the ILDN] so I can watch the other games this year.”

–Staff writer Theresa C. Hebert can be reached at theresa.hebert@thecrimson.com.