I believe it's Barta's decision as to who gets the Iowa nc games. I could be wrong.
listen dude, the BTN owns the rights to the games. barta has no direct say in who gets to broadcast them, as if this decision would ever be left up to one person anyways.
the ESPN family gets first crack at most of the games.
the BTN televises the great majority of other games. iowa and other bad teams get the short end of the stick right now because of poor teams and fan support.
the other games are left to the individual schools through the BTDN (a collaboration of streaming content from the schools), but the rights to these OOC games (like tonight) are retained by the BTN, partially for their "student U" program. this means that the BTN produces the game and provides the equipment and talent to do so. these are generally online-only broadcasts that are streamed directly from the arena over the internet. no satellite truck is required and thats why your local station cant just pick up these games even if they wanted to. it could happen if there was some fiber optic connection at the arena but i am not sure that carver has that. i read somewhere that Hilton may have recently installed one.
however, the BTN does sell the rights to SOME OF these games to companies like mediacom. this means that mediacom provides the truck, talent, production crew and satellite time, and the games are shown on their proprietary channel like MC22. in this instance it would be technically possible for your local channel or ESPN Full Court to carry the game, but mediacom doesnt want that to happen because they paid for it and its a competitive advantage for them.
i am not an expert but this is the best that i can explain it after a long discussion with someone in the business.