On Monday, the University of Hawai‘i's athletics department announced its one-year deal with Spectrum Sports for the 2025-2026 season.
The local television rights deal was a stopgap for the school and department, which is set to join the Mountain West Conference as a full-time member in the summer of 2026. The Mountain West is currently negotiating its own media rights deal, which coincides with Hawai‘i joining the conference.
The highlight of Monday's announcement, which followed with a press conference at the Stan Sheriff Center's Ed Wong Hospitality Room, was that the pay-per-view model for UH football games being televised by Spectrum in 2025 was being eliminated.
For the last two-and-a-half decades, University of Hawai‘i football games being televised locally were shown on a pay-per-view basis. Spectrum's deal with UH began in 2011. Prior to that, UH contests were televised on KFVE.
In 2024, individual UH football games on Spectrum pay-per-view were $69.99, while a season package could be purchased for $299.99.
Seven University of Hawai‘i football games will be televised on Spectrum in 2025. Hawai‘i's lone road game televised on Spectrum, an Oct. 18 contest at Colorado State, will also be shown free of additional charge locally to Spectrum and Hawaiian Telcom subscribers.
Hawai‘i athletics director Matt Elliott, UH president Wendy Hensel, and football head coach Timmy Chang all spoke at Monday's press conference. The trio, along with many others in the department, shared the goal of making UH games more accessible to fans.
"I've heard people talking about this for years, like, 'Wow, can we just not have pay-per-view? Is it possible? I understand in the past, that was the best model for us but things have just changed," Elliott told Aloha State Daily. "I think I just got really lucky and fortunate as a department, that we were in this period where the Mountain West, we gotta wait a year, but the Spectrum deal was ending. OK, let's think about it really creatively, and we'll figure out a way. So it's pretty cool."
Viewers on the Mainland can watch live UH football games on Spectrum for free via the Mountain West app, though Elliott said more opportunities for Rainbow Warrior fans outside of Hawai‘i to tune in are being worked on.
"That's still in the works. One of the things that's exciting about this deal is it actually gives us the opportunity to go out and try to sell these six home football games to the fans on the continent, so we can now do that," he said. "We have permission with this deal to do that for again, this one-year period. We're already actively engaged in that process. It's another opportunity to bring attention, to bring exposure to this program, and it's also a revenue opportunity, so we will hopefully have more to share on that in the future. But this contract itself, again, in partnership with Spectrum, gives us that opportunity, which we think is really exciting news."
Chang, a former record-setting quarterback for UH from 2000 to 2004, understands the mystique of home games televised locally, which kick off at 6 p.m.
Hawai‘i football home games are typically the cappers of long college football Saturdays and are called the "chase game," giving gamblers one last opportunity to profit on game day.
"Our game is on a specific time," Chang said during the press conference. "We play that late night special game to get it to all the fans out there. You can really become America's darling team. ... This is all part of it. It's all part of the messaging. So Hawai‘i, this is game-changer for us, and just really excited to be a part of this."
UH previously earned $3.2 million annually from Spectrum as part of its deal. With no pay-per-view profits in 2025, Elliott says he's not sure how much the school will gain financially for the upcoming year.
"Our overall revenue for media rights will be made up by a number of different components," Elliott said. "With this opportunity, we have to go out and try to market additional assets. So, we don't know what the full total will be yet. That's something we're working on, but all of those pieces together will give us the final package."
Though dropping football pay-per-view was the headliner, the deal between UH and Spectrum for the 2025-2026 academic year covers all sports, with at least 90 events expected to become televised. Akin to Spectrum's Hawai‘i high school sports inventory, the deal will give UH the ability to show multiple sporting events happening at once on campus.
"The deal has the ability now, and this is new, that if Spectrum is doing one game and we have a different sport going on at the same time, we could try to produce that internally," Elliott told ASD. "So, we have to figure out what our capacity is, how much that costs, obviously, but that means maybe in the spring, you're watching volleyball on one channel, and you also have the opportunity to see baseball as well, which, that could be pretty cool."
Christian Shimabuku can be reached at christian@alohastatedaily.com.
