Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick and the Irish's athletic department tried something new Tuesday night, as Swarbrick participated in a Google+ hangout with several members of the Irish's blogosphere.

The roughly 30-minute session, which was cut short because of technical difficulties, touched on a variety of topics, from improving home-field advantage at Notre Dame Stadium to some of the athletic department's media initiatives.

The most newsworthy item to come from the session centered around the status of Notre Dame's television deal with NBC, which runs through 2015. Swarbrick has said that Notre Dame has every intention of eventually renewing the contract, and he went into further detail about the Irish's TV relationship during Tuesday's hangout.

"A couple of times I've indicated that we were focused on using the summer to conclude that process," Swarbrick said. "There's no fixed deadline, but I do think as we head into football season we'll probably get ourselves in a position where we've at least concluded those discussions for a while. Not predicting the outcome, we'll meet again in the coming weeks. But the discussion has been great, and it's really focused on things like this: How might we define the relationship in the future to take fuller advantage of the assets that NBC/Comcast now has?

"And so they've been helping us think about some new applications, some new technology, that will really allow us to take our core asset — which is the game of course — do more shoulder programming around it, enhance the game experience when you're watching it with additional elements that I think we'll be able to add, and just allowing us to take our content and distribute it in so many more ways. That's our future, and that's what we want to focus on with them.

"They're a great partner and I wouldn't read too much one away or another into the contract discussions. The relationship is a long-term relationship, and at point in times we stop and take a look at where we are but there's no magic to that."

The entirety of the hangout can be viewed here.