ESPN opens up its mobile playbook

With ESPN poised to celebrate its 30th anniversary Sept. 7, the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports is laying the groundwork for its next three decades, expanding its digital footprint across the Web and mobile channels as viewers embrace a more interactive, multi-platform fan experience.

"We've adopted a ‘best-screen-available' approach--we're trying to put our best product everywhere, wherever the sports fan is best served," said ESPN president George Bodenheimer during a media event last week at the sports programming giant's Bristol, Conn. headquarters. According to Bodenheimer, ESPN is "six or seven years ahead of the competition" in the digital space, noting the company began addressing commonplace technological and content licensing issues more than a decade ago.

As ESPN Digital Media Senior Vice President of Production and Product Development John Zehr pointed out, the company's mobile content roots date back to 1995, with the introduction of scoring alerts optimized for pagers. Fourteen years later, ESPN transmits about 63 million mobile alerts each month and has a series of new mobile applications on tap including a BlackBerry version of its ESPN MVP service (available via Verizon Wireless), a fantasy football alert app for Apple's iPhone, and an ESPN Radio app for both iPhone and BlackBerry smartphones. "We see [mobile] as a major growth area for us, and importantly, people seem more likely to pay for content on mobile than they are for the PC, so that opens up additional opportunities," Zehr said.

Signs of growth

Zehr added that ESPN's mobile Web traffic is now beginning to exceed its traditional PC traffic, especially during calendar periods like college football season, when most games take place on Saturday afternoons--a point in time when many fans are away from their home televisions. According to Zehr, ESPN's mobile website now boasts more than 9 million unique users and claims a 65 percent market share, with traffic growing 78 percent year-over-year. Smartphones generate 70 percent of that traffic, led by BlackBerry devices.

Like most content providers, ESPN is actively targeting the iPhone user segment as well. Its ScoreCenter application for the iPhone, launched on the App Store June 18, has already topped the 2 million download milestone and at press time ranks as the virtual storefront's second most popular free sports app, behind ESPN's own Fantasy Football 2009 Draft Kit. Most noteworthy, 80 percent of ScoreCenter users come back to the app within 30 days of downloading--earlier this year, iPhone analytics firm Pinch Media reported [1] that consumers stop using the average iPhone app almost immediately, with only 20 percent of users ever returning to an app the day after downloading it. "The iPhone raised the bar--now everyone is using data," Zehr said. "It turbocharged the marketplace."

In addition to scores, fantasy sports alerts and audio content, ESPN continues to ramp up its mobile video efforts--it plans to simulcast about 1,000 live events this year, and averages about 75 mobile video clips per day, along with complete episodes of some network broadcasts. "Video is core to everything ESPN does," Zehr said. ESPN also is integrating mobile services with its cable broadcasts, delivering 22 on-air messaging campaigns in 2009, including an upcoming shortcode campaign in conjunction with its popular "College GameDay" program. In early July, ESPN2 also premiered "SportsNation," an interactive daily program with a focus on user-generated content including online polling, viral videos and athlete and viewer tweets.

Representing the network

Speaking of tweeting, multiple ESPN execs also addressed a controversy [2] that erupted over the network's internal Twitter policies, clarifying it imposed rules on microblogging not to restrict employees but make sure they "understand they represent the ESPN brand," said ESPN.com Vice President and Executive Editor Patrick Stiegman. "We never said that our people couldn't tweet," ESPN Executive Vice President of Content John Skipper added. "It's simply important to remember that Twitter is not private communication." Stiegman said ESPN is presently looking at ways to more effectively incorporate employee Twitter content into its website: "As a user, I shouldn't necessarily have to go to another platform to find what an ESPN perspective is on a particular story of the day. I also want to make sure that this content is available on ESPN.com."

If anything, the opportunities and challenges facing ESPN's digital efforts mirror the same questions that surrounded the cable network when it first went on the airwaves in 1979. "People said ‘Cable TV--what is it? I have to pay 20 bucks a month for TV?'" recalled veteran ESPN anchor Chris Berman. "We tried everything under the sun. We didn't know what the hell we were doing. ... Now I keep waiting to reach a ceiling for sports fandom." And Berman's prediction for the future of sports media? "Thirty years from now, the Super Bowl will be played on the moon--and we'll be televising it."