Over the last 6 years I've read so many dooms day scenarios for pretty much every school out there and every conference outside of the BIG and SEC.
Who knows what will happen in the future, but IMO, Pitt is in a strong conference and is partnered long term (at least 2036) with one of the leaders in the industry (ESPN) and I feel comfortable that they have a pulse on the changing industry.
Personally, I highly doubt the future is about individual teams and their strength of streaming. There are going to still be some form of packages/bundles or things will get pretty damn expensive for the consumer.
Here's the problem with the theory it will all be streaming revenue determined by individual team's fanbase size: there is no historic precedence for it. Before the SEC Network, a few SEC schools tried to do pay-per-view for their early season garbage football games and that failed miserably. The LHN has largely a failure because the NCAA was unable to attach Texas high school football to its content. No fanbase is larger than Texas, and there was no appetite for that content. The Pac has tried to sell its network by providing a regional emphasis slate (bundling the schools in each state together) and they've failed miserable getting it picked up and it is far behind the revenue of the SEC and B10 Networks because it doesn't have partner to bundle it with other offerings and push the channel by moving desirable content on to it. ESPN/ABC, and NBC, and CBS, and Fox sports (or Netflix or Prime or whoever enters sports) aren't going away and they're not going to give up rights to desirable content in order to promote a university's own streaming services that they'd get no cut of. And if a school pulls their content from these networks, even if these providers are streaming, for their own service, they're going to take a huge promotional hit that will undoubtedly see them fade into obscurity.
Regardless of things moving from cable bundles to streaming, it is much better to have things bundled together with peer partners (safety in numbers) and under an ESPN banner, than trying to hawk these things yourself. Consider how many diehards a school has...maybe based on the number of boosters or season ticket holders. FSU has about 21K athletic donors, the most in the ACC. That's who you are basically targeting for more money with this type of content: superfans that likely already give. What are you going to charge for 9 months of sports not picked up by the bigger sports media companies? $100, $200 from people you already have your hand out to? You are talking probably talking about $2 to $4 million a year off of that compared to $10 million or more a year for the current network channel projections, and that doesn't take into account production costs that, when not shared across a conference or with an established media partner, will substantially eat into that. The conference network model works because ESPN is willing to bundle them with other channels and provide more content to push the channels as it deals with providers. Disney adds major heft. That's why the latter might work with streaming as well. You want to stream ESPN 1 & 2, you have to pick up the streaming package the ACCN and SECN as well, and you'll likely pay more for each channel than if you subscribed to cable, but have a smaller cable bill over all . Heck, you want the Disney Family Streaming Pack with the Disney channel, movie archive collection, and whatever other garbage they have, well sports might be included or available at a discounted add on. But for schools going it alone with streaming, good luck. They're going to be making substantially less no matter how big their fan base. There is no way in hell anyone would trade places with any other network deal right now when under the umbrella of the mouse.
