SMU has a wish list for how it hopes to spend its multi-million-dollar annual portion of the American Athletic Conference's new TV contract with ESPN.

But athletic director Rick Hart won't reveal the program's hopes just yet -- not before the league determines how to execute the broadcasts.

The AAC agreed to a 12-year, nearly $1 billion deal with ESPN in March that will begin in the 2020-21 school year and be split among member institutions. It averages about $7 million a school per year.

As the deal provides a significant boost from the conference's current TV revenue, the plans for all conference sports to appear on the network's linear cable and digital platforms started to take form Wednesday during the league's spring meetings.

"It's a competitive environment," Hart said of the agreement that will more than triple the league's current deal. "So in a lot of ways it will create some stability in terms of what we're already doing and then give us an opportunity to be strategic about how we deploy newer additional resources ... rather than just maybe having to stay on the treadmill."

Most of the discussion Wednesday, Hart said, centered on how each of the AAC's programs will begin to build their in-house TV production operations.

The agreement with ESPN will feature more of the league's football and basketball games on its cable channels, but the majority of the games across all sports will broadcast on ESPN+, the network's subscription-based online platform.

To do so will require each school to produce its own infrastructure and content for broadcast.

While other leagues have operated under similar models for cable contracts or conference-owned networks, Hart said the endeavor will be new for each AAC program.

Some schools might draw from journalism programs to create learning opportunities. Others might turn to resources in their cities. Hart said attendees Wednesday worked to create a "commonality or minimum threshold or standard" for the broadcast set-up.

"We can take it from there to determine how we're going to implement it on each campus," Hart said.

The value of the future deal with ESPN trails Power Five conference contracts, though American commissioner Michael Aresco said the league will benefit from Navy's separate football broadcast deals.

The Big Ten's most recent deal with Fox and ESPN, for example, will pay the conference $2.64 billion over six years. And the ACC, the Power Five conference with the smallest TV contract payouts to members, last year averaged $26.6 million per program.

But Aresco views his group's commitment from ESPN as a sign of the conference's potential after less than a decade of operation.

"I'm confident that this gives us a chance," Aresco said. "It gives us a chance to continue to compete and make our case for the [Power Six]. It energizes it, I think, and I think everybody's pretty optimistic that we'll continue on this upward trajectory."