GREENSBORO, N.C. -- With several years remaining on its current TV deals, the ACC isn't in a position to follow the Big Ten Conference's lead and create a league-owned and operated channel any time soon, Commissioner John Swofford said last week.

Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany recently announced plans for a network that will be available on DirecTV and will broadcast live games in several sports. The decision, inspired by the NFL's in-house network, is considered a bold -- if exploratory -- step toward the future of sports TV distribution in a perpetually changing marketplace. And it was hastened in part by timing, as the Big Ten's national television deals are near their end and the conference sought to try another option while renewing its relationships with ABC and ESPN.

The ACC, on the other hand, has television contracts that run through 2010 in football and 2011 in men's basketball and can't ponder new horizons quite yet. So it will watch how the Big Ten does until at least 2008. Renewal talks usually start two years before the end of existing contracts.

"I was with Jim last week, and I told him, 'congratulations,'" Swofford said of his fellow commissioner. "It's one of those things where the Big Ten will be a trailblazer, and that's to their credit. The rest of us will get to learn a bit from what they do because of the timing."

Swofford said any change in TV relationships involves risk because it ultimately takes some high-demand live events from free, over-the-air syndication packages and places them on the new channel. And any new channel initially faces distribution and availability obstacles. DirecTV, while the nation's most popular satellite service, only has 15 million customers -- about one in seven households.

A cautionary tale involves the NBA's Charlotte Bobcats. The team's owner, Robert Johnson, is considered a TV innovator who built Black Entertainment Television from an idea to prominence, but even he couldn't make a Bobcats-fronted channel work on cable.

"You make some choices," Swofford said. "You gain some things and you give up others. Obviously, the Big Ten isn't moving away from their ESPN and ABC contracts; they're even expanding them. But they will have some events on the Big Ten channel. They'll have some things on there that were on cable or in syndication that will no longer be there. But they'll also have events that weren't getting any exposure."

Technology and its impact on the consumer are at the forefront of the ACC's thinking these days, even if the conference TV network concept is down the road.

One element is the distribution of live game broadcasts via the Internet, into which the league delved in a limited fashion in 2005-06. The most visible example was the availability of some ACC Tournament men's basketball games in markets where they weren't guaranteed to be shown on television. Swofford said he anticipates an increase in the number of TV broadcasts simulcast on the Web during the 2006-07 school year, but the precise number won't be known until August or September.

The league addressed the burgeoning issue of Internet telecasts in 1999 when it made its basketball arrangement with Raycom and its corporate partner at the time, Jefferson-Pilot. (JP was acquired by Lincoln Financial in 2005.) The Raycom-Lincoln Financial partnership has rights to income derived from the Internet programming.

As to the long term, ESPN recently launched a service that offers streaming video to mobile phones. So, how long before a fan can watch a game in the palm of his hand?

"Probably sooner than we think. That's my answer to that," Swofford said. "There are quality questions about video streaming, and if you're going to do it, you need to do it well. And preferably from the beginning.

"Things are changing so rapidly that it's a real challenge for institutions and conferences and television partners to keep up with those changes and where these things may be leading us."