Where can you see the ACC Network in Chattanooga?

New Georgia Tech coach Geoff Collins will take his Yellow Jackets into Thursday night's opener at No. 1 Clemson, which will be the first football game televised by the ACC Network.
New Georgia Tech coach Geoff Collins will take his Yellow Jackets into Thursday night's opener at No. 1 Clemson, which will be the first football game televised by the ACC Network.

The ACC Network is up and running, but not everybody is on board.

Owned and operated by ESPN in partnership with the Atlantic Coast Conference, the ACC Network launched this past Thursday night and can be viewed in Chattanooga on EPB Fiber Optics and DIRECTV and through three streaming services: Hulu, PlayStation Vue and YouTube TV.

As of Sunday, Comcast Xfinity and DISH Network had yet to add the ACC Network to their lineups.

"We are very pleased with the distribution agreements that we have in place currently," ESPN senior vice president Rosalyn Carter said last week on a conference call. "As you would imagine, we continue to have lots of conversations, and productive conversations, with other distributors for ACC Network coverage, in the ACC footprint and beyond the footprint.

"We are very fortunate to already have multiple viable options in place for fans to access the network if their home distributor does not carry it."

EPB Fiber Optics has the ACC Network on channel 175 and high-definition channel 475. It can be found on DIRECTV channel 612, which is right next to the SEC Network on channel 611.

The SEC Network launched in August 2014. Comcast Xfinity was on board with the SEC Network at its birth, but its absence has been noted in ACC markets such as Tallahassee, Florida. The ACC Network's first live sporting event was a women's soccer match between Wisconsin and Florida State on Sunday.

"We would have liked to have Comcast come on by now, but I think we are all still very excited," Florida State associate athletic director Jason Dennard told the Tallahassee Democrat. "There is no trepidation on our part in terms of excitement. We are genuinely excited that people have an option to be able to get it because of the various options."

The first football game on the ACC Network will be shown Thursday night at 8, when reigning national champion Clemson hosts Georgia Tech in a league matchup to open the season. According to ESPN, the ACC Network will televise 40 football games among its 450 live contests throughout the 2019-20 school year.

The ACC and the SEC are the only conferences to be represented in each of the first five editions of the College Football Playoff, with the ACC having won three of the past six national championships after the SEC's streak of seven in a row.

The ACC Network has a weekday morning show with Mark Packer and Wes Durham, who once served as the radio play-by-play broadcaster for Georgia Tech and still works in that capacity with the NFL's Atlanta Falcons.

The ACC Network also has 90-minute documentaries, such as "The Class That Saved Coach K," which details Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski's touted 1982 basketball recruiting class headed by Mark Alarie, Jay Bilas, Johnny Dawkins and David Henderson. That class went 11-17 as freshmen in 1982-83, losing 109-66 to Virginia in the first round of the 1983 ACC tournament. The next three seasons yielded NCAA tournament appearances, with the 1985-86 team posting a 37-3 record and reaching the championship game against Louisville.

Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.

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