6 awesome ways you can watch the BCS Championship thanks to ESPN’s ‘megacast’

ESPN plans to unveil a programming platform of such scope and scale for the BCS National Championship Game that the network describes it as a “megacast.”

In total, the network will offer six different ways to follow Florida State and Auburn on Jan. 6, beginning with the tent-pole program: the game itself, Seminoles against Tigers, called by the team of Brent Musburger and Kirk Herbstreit on ESPN. Augmenting the normal broadcast are a number of game-centric viewing options across ESPN’s family of networks, whether televised -- as on ESPN2, ESPNEWS, ESPN Goal Line and ESPN Classic -- or online, via the network’s ESPN3 service. Each channel will begin its broadcast at 8:30 p.m. Eastern, coinciding with kickoff of the championship game. “The majority of the people will still watch the game on ESPN,” Norby Williamson, ESPN’s executive vice president, programming, told USA TODAY Sports. “But our hope is people will sample other things. Whether they’re flipping from ESPN, flipping over to these other offerings. Whether it’s additive, whether it’s people watching on a second screen while they’re watching the game and tweeting in, in hopes that some of their tweets will show up on ESPN. That’s the overall concept.”