Replays, condensed games and highlights for the Nittany Lions, Buckeyes, Boilermakers, Hoosiers, Wolverines and other Big Ten squads will be available on video on demand and Comcast's Internet portal, Comcast.net, the organizations said.
The compromise deal ends a bruising and public dispute between the Big Ten and Comcast that focused on the soaring cost of sports entertainment for pay-TV customers, and on Comcast's power to make or break a new entertainment network with its huge reach into the homes of almost 25 million subscribers.
The Big Ten already has a signed carriage deal with the leading satellite-TV provider DirecTV, but it needed to nail the deal with the giant Comcast to compel other cable companies to jump on board.
Comcast and other cable companies say sports programmers are jamming through double-digit rate increases each year. The carriers have to swallow those costs, which erodes profit margins, or pass them on to consumers.
Comcast feared that a deal with the Big Ten would open the door for other college conferences to launch 24-hour sports channels, which would further drive up costs.
The Big Ten countered that Comcast wouldn't sign a deal because the Philadelphia company didn't own at least part of the new network, and it was treating the new network differently than Comcast's own sports networks, Versus and the Golf Channel, which have limited audiences and low ratings.
The two organizations toned down their rhetoric to work on a deal in recent months, as pressure rose to reach agreement before the next college football season.
"We are very pleased," Madison Bond, Comcast's executive vice president of content acquisition, said in a statement.
