It’s finally here.

After talk, talk and more talk the last several years, the Atlantic Coast Conference seems to be finally getting its own cable television network.

Multiple Sources around the ACC confirmed to the Clemson Insider on Monday night a deal is done with ESPN, and ACC Commissioner John Swofford could make an announcement as early as Thursday as part of the conference’s annual football kickoff with the media.

One source tells TCI the ACC Network could launch in the next three years. According to ESPN’s Brett Murphy the network will launch in 2019 and the conference will extend its grant of rights through 2036. Part of the new grant of rights means if Notre Dame joins a conference for football before 2036, it has to join the ACC.

Also, a source confirmed with TCI that there could be some other avenues on the internet in which the conference’s games could be streamed. The source would not say what those avenues were, but it was hinted it could be in line with what some other Power 5 Conferences are doing.

The Pac 12 announced last week a deal with Twitter to live stream some of its sporting events from its platform.

“I will put my bet on the really smart people on ESPN to understand how to monetize live sports television because it is not a weekly serial sitcom or something else that it is easily DVR and watched at another point in time or movie,” Clemson athletic director Dan Radakovich told TCI on April 28. “Live sports are really a unique situation as it relates to television. They are at the forefront of owning rights and being able to create those types of monetization of those rights.

“How are we going to gather it in five years? I have no idea. But will it be paid for? Probably, in some way shape or form. It goes a little beyond the cord cutting. You can cut the cord, but you better have some type of line that brings the information to you. Even in your own house with WiFi, you have to able to have something to bring that in. Then the idea of paying for that particular bundle of service, it moves away from your cable operator and into another way to consume that information. We are putting our dollars on the ESPN horse in this race, knowing they have motivation to go out and monetize this right they have already purchased.”

At the spring meetings back in May, the league was having discussions with ESPN about the possibility of a network.

The ACC’s current deal runs through 2026-’27, but the major concern for the ACC is not allowing itself to fall further behind the SEC and the Big Ten. In 2014, the Southeastern Conference generated $347 million in television money. According to forbes.com, $300 million of that came from ESPN between rights fees and the conference’s share of profits from the SEC Network.

In its first year, the SEC Network kicked off around $112 million for the SEC. In April, it was reported the Big 10 Conference and Fox Sports are close to a new media rights deal that could rival or surpass the SEC’s.

Early projections say the new deal could make more than $40 million annually for Big Ten schools.

The ACC has talked about looking into the possibility of starting its own network for several years, but it keeps getting pushed back because ESPN’s viewership has gone down in the last couple of years as more people are ditching their cable providers such as Comcast, Time Warner and DirecTV for streaming on the internet.

“Do we have to be where the Big Ten is? I don’t know if we will ever get there. If that is an aspiration, then it could be an aspiration that we chase forever. Do we need to get to where the SEC is? They have been ahead of us right now. How do we get in the game? That is what we need to be able to do as a league is get in the game and that is what this network will allow us to do,” Radakovich told TCI back in April. “When you start to wonder how many dollars and those types of things are coming in, you don’t know. That’s tough to account for right there because we don’t know. You don’t know and I don’t know.

“When those dollars come into Ohio State, how much of those dollars go to the university? How much of those dollars are taken by the university to run the general university and not specifically the athletic department? How much of that happens at Illinois, or Iowa, or Penn State? Maybe it’s none or maybe it’s a lot. The same thing within the SEC, how many of those dollars, when the president sees those new monies coming in, do they take a piece of that to help operate the rest of the university? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t.

“It’s clear they’re bringing in more revenue than we are and we have to be able to help mitigate that at some point and time, and the network is a way to do that.”