San Francisco Nabs TV and Internet Content Company
Submitted December 16, 2011, 8:20 PM
San Francisco’s vibrancy and concentration of talent with expertise in new media drew the newly formed content and media company Pac-12 Enterprises to San Francisco, its president said.
Pac-12 announced Dec. 16 it had signed an 11-year lease with Kilroy Realty Corp. to occupy 70,000 square feet at 370 Third St. in San Francisco’s South of Market. Kilroy agreed to purchase the 430,000 square-foot building for just more than $92 million in November. Lease negotiations with Pac-12 proceeded simultaneously with Kilroy’s closing activities.
“If you go to other markets around the country, it doesn’t have the same feeling of connection to the rest of the world,” he said. “For an employer, when you are starting a new business, that unique feel accrues to your brand.”
Pac-12 Enterprises is the umbrella organization for three new business operating units affiliated with the Pac-12 Conference of 12 Western universities including Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Los Angeles; and University of Southern California. The Pac-12 Conference offices are in Walnut Creek.
Pac-12 Enterprises is above all a content company, Stevenson said. “We are bringing content into our company and pushing it out to whatever screen someone is using at any moment in time. We chose to be in San Francisco because it has the most companies that are thinking about innovative ways to distribute content and to change the way that content is digested,” he said.
“If we were just in the traditional TV business, New York or Los Angeles would probably have been a better idea,” he said.
The San Francisco space is the headquarters for the new Pac-12 Networks, Pac-12 Digital Network and Pac-12 Properties.
Pac-12 Networks will have a fully formed television studio at 370 Third and expects to televise more than 850 live sporting events annually, including all conference football games and men’s basketball games that are not carried by its national telecast partners ESPN and Fox. The group will have one national network and six regional networks in conjunction with cable operators Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Cox Communications Inc. and Bright House Networks.
The national Pac-12 network will distribute content nationwide. The six regional networks will generate programming for the national network and regional programming that relates to the universities in a given geography. The idea is to create programming that is specific to Berkeley and Stanford or USC and UCLA that will be offered to viewers in the geographies where the schools are located, Stevenson said.
The formula includes the notion of “TV everywhere” and allows the networks’ programming to be viewed not only at customers’ homes but also on any digital device.
