ESPN to Offer Sports Events on the Web Free to Some

New York Times
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: February 4, 2008

ESPN, the dominant channel for sports programming, will announce this week that Web users on college campuses and military bases — anyone in the .edu or .mil domain — will be able to access live programming on its Web site, ESPN360, without charge.

Opening ESPN360’s doors to college students and members of the military will more than double its base of possible users, potentially driving traffic to a site that has recorded only 500,000 viewing hours since it started focusing on live sporting events last September.

Cable companies pay nearly $3 a subscriber to broadcast ESPN on television. But its Web site, which provides live coverage of more than 2,500 sporting events a year, is accessible only to the 20 million subscribers to Internet service providers that have reached agreements with ESPN.

... ESPN, which is 80 percent owned by the Walt Disney Company and 20 percent by Hearst Corporation, has frustrated some fans by putting an electronic wall around some sporting events. Users cannot subscribe to the service separately; they receive it through their Internet service provider or not at all.

AT&T, Verizon, RCN and Charter are among those that offer it. On Friday ESPN signed an agreement with Insight, a Midwestern cable operator, which will make the platform available to 700,000 subscribers next week.

But several major cable operators, Comcast and Time Warner Cable among them, have not signed on.

The notion of paying a subscriber fee for content is relatively new to the mainstream Internet, and fairly uncomfortable.

Some telephone and cable companies have considered charging content providers for priority access, raising concerns about so-called network neutrality, a tenet that rejects discrimination in the transmission of online information. ESPN is practicing the reverse, charging the carriers to give users access to a Web site.

Eric Rabe, a vice president for communications for Verizon, said ESPN360 could attract users.

“You can’t underestimate the value of live, streaming sports in attracting customers who are extremely loyal and who will also want television and mobile phone services from Verizon,” he said.

John Zehr, the network’s senior vice president for digital media production, said the ESPN360 platform allowed the broadcaster to expand beyond its six cable channels.

In September, ESPN360 moved from mostly taped to mostly live programming. There is no shortage of programming; “24 hours a day, there is some sporting event being played around the globe,” Mr. Zehr said.

Last month, the service showed more than 450 hours of Australian Open tennis as well as 225 college basketball games, cricket matches, international soccer matches and the Winter X Games. Mr. Zehr said the Australian Open coverage was especially popular.

“While our linear network can only bring you one court at a time, you can be watching six different courts within the application,” he said.