ESPN's Mobile Phone Bounced from the Playing Field
Less than a year after ESPN spectacularly launched its Mobile ESPN product on Super Bowl Sunday 2006, the company decided to shut it down. ESPN won’t have to sell off its cell phone towers and wireless networking equipment, however, because with the Mobile ESPN service, ESPN was acting as an MVNO, or mobile virtual network operator.
An MVNO doesn't operate its own wireless networks, like a traditional carrier such as Verizon Wireless. Businesses such as ESPN purchase minutes of use from mobile phone operators, in ESPN's case Sprint, and offer wireless services with their brand firmly attached. In essence, the MVNO experience is the marketing department at its finest -- extending the brand of an already well-known entity to offer more of its (presumably) unique services to (naturally) make more money for said entity.
Apparently Disney (ESPN's parent company) "flagged" ESPN for not having enough "players on the field," as in not enough subscribers willing to shell out the money for what ESPN claimed was a sports fanatic's dream phone.
It's not like this came out of nowhere. Back in July, a Merrill Lynch media analyst suggested that Disney should shut the service down. The analyst, Jessica Reif Cohen, predicted that Mobile ESPN was likely to attract just 30,000 subscribers by the end of the year. Which, for those of you scoring at home, was really bad.
Back in April, Wes Henderek, a senior analyst for wireless services at market researcher CurrentAnalysis, told me that because of the huge financial and technological investments, an MVNO is an extremely risky endeavor for companies. "The market is just being flooded, and there's no way all of these MVNOs are going to survive," he said.
But if you look back even further in Mobile ESPN's development, maybe the product was doomed even before the first Super Bowl commercial was filmed. In my May 1, 2006, profile of ESPN technology chief Chuck Pagano, I discovered that ESPN's IT department wasn't even aware of the project until it was a "done deal," said ESPN's IT head Paul Cushing. When, in fact, Cushing and his staff found out about the project, they were able to deliver some key pieces of technology that were initially going to be outsourced. If IT had been brought in earlier on the initiative, maybe IT could have made a better impact, Cushing said.
Hmmmm. Could IT's lack of involvement been a reason for the death of Mobile ESPN? Probably not. But it does raise some interesting questions, doesn't it?
Previous Post: What's A Guy Gotta Do to Get Pretexted Around Here?Next Post: Remote Worker Costs To Go Through the Roof
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
