College football fans who tried to watch last week’s UTEP-Louisiana Lafayette football game on the Internet at ESPN360.com may have been surprised to find they couldn’t hook up to the service on their broadband connection, depending on their Internet service provider.

The same is true for this week’s Troy-LSU game, which will be one of the games available Saturday on ESPN360.com, a broadband network that features such sports as college football, NBA basketball, Major League Baseball and professional golf events in live and archived Internet broadcasts, free of charge to broadband Internet customers.

A press release from ESPN stated that more than 3,000 live sports events were delivered on the service last year to about 24 million homes and 18 million U.S. college students and U.S.-based military personnel.

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It is available through more than 20 Internet service providers (ISPs) nationwide, including AT&T, Verizon and Charter, but there other ISPs such as Cox, Comcast and Time Warner do not carry the service.

The reason? Though ESPN360.com does not charge fees directly to viewers, the Internet service providers (ISPs) themsevles must pay ESPN to carry the service, said Sharon Kleinpeter, Cox Communications Vice President for Governmental and Public Affairs.

“I found out to my surprise that ESPN360.com is a subscription service, and is part of a negotiated deal with ESPN,” said Kleinpeter. “I didn’t even know that happened on the Internet.”

Having a product like ESPN360.com that ISPs must pay a fee to include in their service isn’t typical, ESPN spokesman Paul Melvin said in an e-mail response to an inquiry about the service.

“But the product itself is very unique also,” wrote Melvin. “�- we’ve adopted a model that we think is a win-win-win: Sports fans win because they can see thousands of live sporting events, from marquee events to underserved niche sports, and they get them at no cost beyond what they pay for high speed Internet access; our ISP partners win because we are providing them with exremely valuable content (live sports) that helps differentiate what they can offer to consumers in a competitive market for new highspeed Internet customers; and ESPN is able to commit long-term to building a great portfoio of programming and delivering thousands of events.”

The fees that ISPs pay ESPN for the service are content licensin deals, Melvin explained.

“They pay us a fee and we give them live (and archived on-demand) sports event content,” he wrote. “It’s also important to note that sports is unique �” it has a unique appeal and value, is unique in that people want to watch it live if at all possible, and it also has unique costs (rights fees, live transmission and operations, technology, etc.).”

Negotiations to carry the service are ongoing between ESPN and Cox, among other broadband ISPs, Melvin wrote.

“ESPN is a very tough negotiator, as you can imagine,” said Kleinpeter. “We always have to be concerned with our cost to the customer.”