Until now, mobile sports fans who wanted to listen to such popular ESPN programming as “Mike and Mike in the Morning,” The Herd with Colin Cowherd” and “The Scott Van Pelt Show” couldn’t cache the programs on smartphone memory cards. Listening to ESPN radio required a network connection and drew down battery life. A solution to that problem has arrived, for a fee.
This week, ESPN went into partnership with San Diego-based Slacker Inc. to provide ESPN on Slacker Radio, including premium services priced at $3.99 and $9.99 per month which allow people to store radio programming locally.
If you don’t want to pay to listen to what you want, when you want, Slacker is also delivering a near-instantenous free feed of content from The Death Star (ESPN)
Slacker is the first digital radio distribution service to feature ESPN Radio, and the agreement turns up the heat on such competitors as Last.fm and Pandora to angle for similar deals with ESPN. The deal signals that ESPN is unafraid to be aggressive in flowing digital rights to its content for mobile distribution, which is considered key to the growth of the mobile sports viewing experience. According to Juniper Research, mobile sports content and services like the Slacker/ESPN offering could reach $3.8 billion in 2011.
Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA and AT&T subscribers can bill premium services directly to their accounts via Android and Blackberry smartphone applications, which are already available. A similar iOS application for iPhone and iPad is pending Apple’s approval.
[…] comments follow ESPN’s deal earlier this month to partner with San Diego-based Slacker Inc. to provide ESPN on Slacker Radio, […]