ESPN Puts Sports in the Palm of Your Hand

It comes packaged inside a black box designed with velvety red lining to look more like it contains fine cigars instead of the new ESPN mobile phone.

"To a guy, this is like a Tiffany's box," said Manish K. Jha, general manager of Mobile ESPN.

The phone is the newest cellular man toy: It rings with the sports network's theme song and displays all the scores, trivia, news clips and fantasy football statistics that a guy could handle.

At least, that's the marketing pitch for the phone, which hits retail stores on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 5, for $199 and will run on Sprint Nextel Corp.'s high-speed network.

Targeted marketing is a big deal in the cellular industry, where no demographic is without a themed phone designed to cater to its specific needs. Walt Disney Co. is among several companies marketing phones for young children, a company called Amp'd Mobile is for the slightly edgier male audience, and prepaid services such as Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA target teenagers.

For ESPN, the technical challenge -- and the exploitable market niche -- was in trying to make it easier to access the Web with a few clicks and make the small cell phone screen look more like television than just text-based sports scores.

In the case of its first model, called the Sanyo MVP, the phone's background screen is a snapshot of ESPN Magazine, and its keypad comes with a button marked "E" that connects to the ESPN Web site with one click. Although live streaming television doesn't come on this phone, a user can click to watch video news clips of sports events. The main page also features a running ticker at the bottom displaying sports headline news. And users can program the phone to display stats of their favorite players and manage fantasy sports teams online.

Price plans, which include talk time and all data features, range from $34.99 a month to $224.99 a month. For now, the Sanyo model is the only one available, though the company plans to introduce others throughout the year.

ESPN was early to embrace new technologies such as developing its own Web page and offering high-definition channels, said Salil K. Mehta, executive vice president of ESPN Enterprises Inc., and getting into the mobile experience is no different. The cellular phone is a logical extension of its business, and "the fan experience is so compelling," he said.

Because cell phones have become so ubiquitous and loaded with so many features, there is a big push to make them easier to use, so that watching videos or looking up information on them is less cumbersome than it is now.

It's possible to get scores on most phones, but the display might be in the form of a text message, so the teams and their scores don't appear on the same line. Navigating the Web on many phones also is a challenge, whether it means typing in the address on a browser or waiting for images to upload. Some Web formats may not fit the screen or may take several clicks to access.

Technology analysts call the cellular phone the "third screen," growing to be as significant as the television or computer. In most cases, the phone is still considered a service that augments the television or computer, although over time it may steal that audience. But as a media company, you can't be concerned about cannibalizing viewership from those other mediums, Mehta said.

After all, he said, two decades ago cable channels such as ESPN were considered new media, and look where that business went.