On May 2, 2013, SEC Commissioner Michael Slive and ESPN president John Skipper formally announced that as part of a long-term, 20-year agreement lasting through 2034, ESPN would launch SEC Network, a network devoted to the conference and an accompanying digital platform, in August 2014.

Its first live regular season football games aired on August 28, 2014, between Texas A&M and South Carolina,[2] and Temple and Vanderbilt.

[4] SEC Network announced plans to broadcast football games featuring all fourteen of the conference's member schools within the first month of the 2014 season.

The network also airs encore presentations of SEC events, along with classic games involving its members.

[4][7] 2018 saw the premiere of the network's first non-sports series, True South, where food writer John T. Edge travels throughout the Southeast and highlights local cuisine and history.

[17] On March 12, 2014, ESPN named Brent Musburger and Jesse Palmer as lead game announcers for SEC Network's football telecasts.

As a result, Musburger was no longer assigned to Saturday Night Football or post-season bowl games.

[20] Musburger left ESPN in 2017 to pursue his new Las Vegas-based sports betting network VSiN,[21][22] and was replaced on the flagship SEC Saturday Night by the new team of Tom Hart, Jordan Rodgers and Cole Cubelic.

[23] On March 24, 2014, it was announced that former University of Alabama and New York Jets quarterback Greg McElroy was hired as a college football analyst for the SEC Network on a multi-year contract.

[34][35] On August 2, 2014, Suddenlink Communications announced that it had reached an agreement to carry the network on the launch date.

[39][40] With the Mediacom agreement, the two major television providers that did not reach a carriage deal prior to launch were Verizon FiOS and Cablevision.

[41] However, on August 21, 2014, Sports Business Daily reported that Verizon FiOS had reached a deal to carry the network in its Texas and Florida service areas (which are within the SEC footprint).