Pay-television broadcaster ESPN will exploit its live football rights through a new website, ESPNFC, whose launch marks the first stage of a rebranding exercise that will cover all of the company’s football-dedicated websites and some of its television programmes.
The new website, which will eventually integrate the ESPN Soccernet, ESPN Deportes and ESPN.com/soccer websites under one brand, will initially focus on the Uefa Euro 2012 national team tournament. It is available online and via mobile, tablet and internet-connected televisions.
ESPN will exploit its live US and Caribbean rights for Euro 2012 on the website for viewers in those territories and will then expand the website’s offering later this year – when the old website URLs are expected to be swallowed up by ESPNFC – to offer live football programming from its worldwide rights portfolio. The coverage will be geo-blocked to viewers outside the territories where the rights are held by ESPN. The ESPNFC website will also offer locally-tailored content in users’ native languages in different parts of the world.
The ESPNFC brand is also expected to be rolled out across some of the network’s football-dedicated programmes worldwide over the coming months. As a starting point, the broadcaster’s football discussion show ESPNsoccernet PressPass has been renamed ESPNFC PressPass.
Russell Wolff, executive vice-president and managing director of the ESPN International division, said: “ESPNFC is really about three things – underlining our commitment to the sport of [football] globally, continuing to build on our existing digital leadership around the globe and enhancing the way we cover the sport locally in markets all over the world through new features, content creators and enhanced localisation and personalisation capabilities.”
ESPN has multi-platform rights for a number of domestic football competitions across various territories. John Kosner, ESPN’s vice-president of digital and print media, told the Financial Times: “Fragmentation is a challenge but it’s also an opportunity. There wasn’t an easy way to access all of those leagues, all of those players in a high quality way and that’s our goal.”