SWAC TV finished its first year with more than 60 million minutes watched, and the conference plans to roughly double the platform’s event count this season, Commissioner Dr. Charles McClelland said at SWAC Football Media Day on July 15 in Birmingham.

McClelland shared the update in an interview with Dr. Kenyatta Cavil of “Inside the HBCU Sports Lab” at the Sheraton-Birmingham, where the conference held its annual football media event.

“SWAC TV exploded much faster than we thought,” McClelland said. “We had over 60 million minutes watched, which is a significant amount of minutes for a startup television station. We had some 480 events. We’re probably gonna have 1,000 this year, so we look for those numbers to go up tremendously.”

The 60 million figure extends the trajectory McClelland described in April, when he told Sports Illustrated the platform had logged more than 55 million minutes watched and over 2.5 million unique viewers through its first eight months. SWAC TV launched on August 1, 2025, as a free streaming platform available on Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple TV, Google Play, and Android TV, carrying all 18 SWAC-sponsored sports.

McClelland acknowledged the platform’s early production struggles. “I was ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater week one, week two,” he said. “I was frustrated. I was getting ready to say, let’s throw everybody away and start all over again. But we were able to work through the kinks and get a lot of the production things out.” He credited advice from Curtis Symonds, the president and co-founder of HBCU GO, who told him early technical problems were normal for a new operation.

How the Venture Capital Deal Feeds the Ad Breaks

McClelland also addressed a question viewers have raised about the platform’s commercial breaks, which sometimes display a “we’ll be right back” slate instead of an advertisement. The answer, he said, comes down to commercial inventory, and the conference’s new venture capital partnership is designed to fill it.

“We signed a deal with a venture capitalist,” McClelland said, “that’s going to put us in a pool of being able to get a whole host of companies that are going to be able to advertise on SWAC TV.”

The deal is the conference’s partnership with Mercurius Media Capital, announced June 3, which made SWAC TV a Strategic Limited Partner in the firm’s media-for-equity venture fund. Under that structure, companies in the firm’s portfolio use SWAC TV’s advertising inventory, and the conference receives equity stakes in those companies in return. Data Driven HBCU covered the structure of that agreement in June.

McClelland explained that SWAC TV also sells advertising through an ad service that targets commercials to individual viewers, which is why two households watching the same game may see different ads, or none at all.

“If your mom is seeing that in her living room, Kenyatta could be seeing a commercial that somebody bought off of the ad server,” McClelland said. “They’re buying based upon who’s watching… They know who’s watching. They know that it’s a female who is 58 years old with a median income of this, based on their signing up with Roku TV or Apple TV. So they’re targeting. So they’ll pay us to be able to target you.”

McClelland said the conference has continued to add corporate partners as the platform grows, and he pointed to national brands, including Ford and an airline, that have already appeared in targeted ad slots.

He closed the SWAC TV portion of the conversation with a message to fans. “Keep watching SWAC TV and keep supporting,” he said. “As long as you watch and as long as you support, we’ll be able to bring it to you in a high-quality fashion.”