International sports broadcaster ESPN launched a new global football mobile application featuring news, live scores, audio and video content as it seeks to exploit mobile, which it described as its fastest-growing platform.
The app will be branded ESPNSoccernet, in line with the broadcaster’s football website. The content on the app will be tailored depending on the part of the world in which the user is accessing it.
“Of all platforms, mobile is growing the fastest for us,” Robin Ashton, commercial director of ESPN’s Digital Media division, told the Guardian. “It’s becoming pretty much one of our most important screens. In the next two years, combined traffic to Soccernet’s mobile website and this app could overtake the main website.”
ESPN is seeking to build on the success of its Goals app in the UK, which re-launched on a free-to-use basis at the beginning of the 2011-12 football season. The app was previously a paid-for service.
ESPN Goals offers video clips of every goal in the English Premier League shortly after they are scored, with the exception of those scored in matches played on Saturdays at 3pm. The Saturday 3pm matches are ‘blacked out’ under Uefa rules designed to protect match attendances and participation in amateur football.
ESPN Goals has been downloaded nearly two million times in the five months since its re-launch and users are watching a total of around seven million match clips every month.
Ashton said the app’s switch from a subscription to an advertising-funded model was working well. “It’s working phenomenally well from both an audience and revenue point of view,” he said. “It’s the holy grail for all of us who work in this sector: to create something we can say is a ‘disrupter’. It’s changing the way people follow football on a Saturday.”