The pay-per-view industry will help kick off the upcoming college basketball season with an October 28 charity game between top-ranked teams Gonzaga and Tennessee.

PPV content aggregator In Demand and its digital service PPV.com will exclusively distribute the inaugural Legends of Basketball Classic exhibition game pitting the No. 2 Bulldogs against the No. 11 Volunteers in a charity event, with the proceeds benefiting the McLendon Foundation, according to the company. The event will retail at a suggested PPV price of $9.99.

While the PPV event category has historically featured ring sports including boxing, mixed martial arts and pro wrestling, In Demand senior VP of programming and marketing Mark Boccardi said the college basketball game helps expand the breadth of programming offered via the PPV platform.

"This is a tremendous tip-off to the unofficial start of this year's college basketball season," Boccardi said. "Having this game on PPV gives fans a unique opportunity to see a fantastic pre-season exhibition game between two of the highest-ranked teams in college basketball. It’s got a March Madness feel and we’re only in October."

Basketball analyst Fran Fraschilla will serve as play-by-play announcer for the game along with Gonzaga college basketball broadcaster Tom Hudson and Tennessee alum and college basketball analyst Dane Bradshaw. Fans purchasing the event on PPV.com will be able to participate in an interactive live chat during the game with reporter Andy Katz, said the company.

“We’re really excited for a new fan base of college basketball fans to watch on our platform,” Boccardi added.

Also on PPV this weekend is Showtime’s October 29 boxing card headlined by a bout between YouTube star Jake Paul and former UFC mixed martial arts champion Anderson Silva. ■

Locast is now available in the Tri-Cities market, which covers an area that includes Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky. Locast says it will make available more than two dozen local TV channels to the area’s nearly 700,000 residents.

The Tri-Cities market includes Bristol, Johnson City and Kingsport in Tennessee; it also covers surrounding rural areas in Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky. Locast collaborated with Bristol Tennessee Essential Services on the deployment.

Locast delivers local TV channels to residents over the internet and with no monthly fee, though the service does ask for a donation of $5 per month to support their operations. It pitches itself as serving consumers that have either become cord-cutters or are cord-nevers.

Also Read: Locast’s Goodfriend on Station Blackouts: ‘Forget DirecTV, Forget Dish’

The rebroadcast of local signals is a point of contention, however, as major broadcasters are suing Locast over its right to do so based on the Copyright Act of 1976.

For its deployment in the Tri-Cities market, Locast delivers 27 channels, including local NBC, Fox, ABC and CBS affiliates and the likes of the CW, Court TV, ION, TrueCrime, LAFF and more.

Viewers in 19 counties across the Tri-Cities market will now be able to receive Locast services, including Leslie and Letcher counties in Kentucky; Carter, Greene, Hawkins, Johnson, Sullivan, Unicoi and Washington counties in Tennessee; and Bristol City, Buchanan, Dickenson, Lee, Norton City, Russell, Scott, Smyth, Washington and Wise counties in Virginia.

Tri-Cities marks Locast’s 32nd market in the U.S. It claims that it has more than 2.6 million subscribers.

For more information, visit www.locast.org.

This story was originally published by Next TV sister publication TV Technology.

Just days after the Tennessee legislature voted down a municipal broadband expansion bill, the State was squaring off with the FCC in federal court over the issue of municipal broadband buildouts and state's ability to limit them.

After the FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler signaled the FCC had the power to preempt state laws blocking the expansion of municipal broadband, the Cities of Wilson, N.C., and Chattanooga, Tenn. petitioned the FCC to do just that. A divided commission complied in March 2015, and Tennessee and North Carolina then filed suit.

The FCC majority in that decision said the agency had the power and the duty to step in when states were limiting broadband buildouts. The commission confirmed it did not have the power to overturn state laws preventing municipal broadband buildouts altogether, but if those states allows such networks, the FCC can pre-empt laws that would limit them.

FCC chairman Tom Wheeler has tabbed those laws as the handiwork of incumbent Internet service providers trying to prevent competition.

The Sixth Circuit federal appeals court--in Cincinnati--heard oral argument Thursday (March 17) in that challenge by the states.

According to Berin Szoka of TechFreedom, who was at the argument, the judges asked tough questions of both sides.

The FCC argued that it did not have to meet the heightened preemption standard of a clear statement of congressional intent because it was not trumping a state's rights to govern its subdivisions, but instead with regulation of commerce more generally, which does not have a heightened bar for preemption.

The FCC is justifying the moves under its Sec. 706 authority to regulate if it concludes that advanced telecommunications is not being deployed in a reasonable and timely manner. "We read section 706 to permit the commission to preempt state laws that primarily serve to regulate competition in the broadband market," the FCC March 2015 order states.

Szoka said two out of the three judges on the three-judge panel hearing the arguments probed on the issue of whether states and their cities were unitary (of a piece) sovereign entities. According to Szoka, the third judge only spoke to wish the court a Happy St. Patrick's day and note the green tie on FCC counsel, which matched his own bright green bow tie.

One judge suggested the FCC might be able to preempt a state's decision to require a radio station to use as different frequency, but that that would be the FCC telling it not to interfere with something over which the FCC has jurisdiction. The judge said that seemed to be different from this case.

In this case, the judge suggested, it was not about the FCC saying what should happen, but saying municipalities should be able to decide, which did sound like an issue with how the state gets to govern its municipal subdivision.

The judges also asked if private companies would also be subject to such a decision, perhaps having to be governed by one of their subdivisions, a board of shareholders, for example, just as municipalities rather than states get to make the decision.

The Tennessee and North Carolina laws are slightly different, Szoka pointed out, with Tennessee's law focused more on geographical limitations on expanding municipal broadband and North Carolina including pricing and not being able to cross subsidize buildouts with money from utility ratepayers, something commercial broadband providers have always been concerned about and one of the reasons they frequently lobby against such laws.