The semifinals and finals of the regional high school basketball tournaments will be live-streamed for free in February after the Maine Principals’ Association accepted a bid from a Vermont company.

Northeast Sports Network Inc., based in Lyndonville, Vermont, will stream a total of 60 games from three sites: the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor, the Augusta Civic Center and Cross Insurance Arena in Portland. The one-year agreement was announced Tuesday.

NSN has experience live-streaming games in Maine, having worked with Bowdoin College and Colby College. Eric Berry, the president and CEO at NSN, said adding the Maine high school basketball tournament to its coverage was an easy decision.

“When you look at the Maine basketball tournament, it’s hard not to be excited when you consider the history about it and the passion that Mainers share for the tournament,” said Berry, who is also the girls’ varsity basketball coach at Lyndon Institute. “We’ve been live-streaming for years and have done a lot of Vermont and New Hampshire tournament games. We felt we’d like to get involved in Maine.”

Dick Durost, the MPA’s executive director, said the association received about six bids for the regional games, but that not all of them included rights fees.

Neither Durost nor Berry would say how much NSN paid for the streaming rights. Durost said the combined bids from NSN and the Maine Public Broadcasting Network, which paid $10,000 for the rights to televise the boys’ and girls’ state championship games in all five classes this year, will be greater than the $16,000 MPBN paid last year for a package that included televising the regional semifinals and finals and the state championship games.

MPBN’s bids have also included highlight packages of the state cheering championships.

Durost said the deal with NSN is important because it allows people who cannot attend the games the chance to watch them for free. He said it is NSN’s responsibility to sell any advertising, which must meet MPA guidelines.

“This has been a priority for me and the association for the last month or two to put something together,” Durost said. “We believe we’ve got a quality company that produces a quality product.”

NSN will hire local play-by-play and color analysts for the games.

“Part of our agreement is to work with people who have worked the games before so that they have an understanding of the teams in each division and the players, so that it will be a seamless entry into our coverage of high school basketball in Maine,” Berry said.

He added that the company has already begun to prepare. They need to put together production crews for each location and find their announcers.

“Even before this announcement came out, I had five people email me saying they heard we got the bid and they wanted in,” Berry said.

Jim Caton, the sports information director at Bowdoin, was pleased that NSN won the bid. He said NSN has been the Polar Bears’ broadcast partner for the last three years and has “delivered tens of thousands of views for us a year. They are great.”

According to a release by the MPA, the Atlanta-based NFHS Network will live-stream the 72 regional quarterfinal games.

Durost said the MPA will provide links to view the games on its website as the tournament approaches.