There are no more football games to not see on the Longhorn Network this season. But with the men’s and women’s college basketball seasons under way, the hard-to-watch, controversial University of Texas/ESPN channel, in conjunction with its only two major providers (Grande Communications and Verizon FiOS), has announced that it will stream its programming for free for three days starting on Friday.
In addition to Friday night’s Stanford at Texas women’s basketball game, the broadband “All-Access Weekend” will feature all of Saturday’s pre- and post-game coverage of the Texas–Missouri football game. In fact, they’ll also have a halftime show! Just not the game itself, which is on FX.
Of course, the LHN could have been set up to do this from day one—ESPN streams a great deal of its programming on ESPN3.com—but that would have meant less pressure on (and value to) providers like Time-Warner Cable and DirecTV. Since those companies have yet to add the channel, the station is obviously hoping that this weekend’s offerings will give fans a new reason to keep asking their providers to pick it up.
