Big West Ends TV Contract : Conflict: Prime Ticket’s demands to change game times prompt action to try to cut losses at the gate.

The Big West Conference, concerned about requests for changes in starting times and about television’s effects on attendance, was released from the final year of its contract with Prime Ticket Network and is negotiating elsewhere, network and conference officials said Wednesday.

Prime Ticket televised more than 130 hours of Big West events during the past year that included football, basketball, softball, baseball and volleyball. It was the second of a three-year agreement.

But Prime Ticket, which serves 4.1 million subscribers in Southern California, Arizona, Nevada and Hawaii, had increasingly requested that starting times of games be changed to avoid conflicts with its higher-priority programming.

“As we continued to increase the number of King games, Laker games, Pac-10 and UCLA and USC games, in order to fit the Big West into the package we had to continue to ask them to move starting times and kickoff times,” said John Severino, Prime Ticket president. “(The Big West) came to us and said the athletic directors were aggravated about the starting times and would we let them out. So we let them out.”

SportsChannel L.A., which is in 130,000 households, is a possible replacement to carry Big West events.

“We’re in very serious conversation with them,” said Lynn Woodard, general manager of SportsChannel L.A. “I think the Big West would be an extremely valuable addition to SportsChannel’s fall and winter programming lineup.”

The Big West, so eager to attract television coverage that it changed its name from Pacific Coast Athletic Assn. in 1988 partly to fit ESPN’s Big Monday basketball program, has found that television coverage can also have disadvantages for a conference still struggling in some areas, particularly in football attendance at schools such as Cal State Long Beach and Cal State Fullerton.

Attendance at those schools is an issue because of NCAA requirements for Division I-A football status calling for five of the conference’s eight schools to average 17,000 at home or 20,000 for all games at least once every four years.