• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, September 8, 2006

TiVo subscribers will gain access to CBS SportsLine.com's fantasy football service through a deal announced Thursday by the two companies.

SportsLine's Fantasy Football Companion will allow TiVo customers with a broadband-enabled DVR to manage their leagues, check stats and scores, and watch highlights by remote control. The Companion service for Tivo is an outgrowth of the downloadable fantasy football application SportsLine created for mobile devices.

Only TiVo subscribers who are already registered for SportsLine's fantasy football league will be able to use the new service. "Our goal is to make our product available in as many ways as possible," said SportsLine spokesman Alex Riethmiller. He added that many of SportsLine's fantasy football players are also TiVo customers.

AT&T is the exclusive sponsor of fantasy football on TiVo. The deal includes a "Gold Star" sponsorship, which will enable viewers to click on a sponsored gold star at the bottom of the Tivo Central page to access the fantasy football service.

AT&T and SportsLine will both also provide promotional videos through Tivo's sponsored Showcase programming for advertisers. The SportsLine videos will carry AT&T pre-roll ads, and will focus on individual NFL teams while AT&T's will take viewers into the living rooms of NFL players.

Tivo will also display "interactive tags" in AT&T commercials as they appear on TV, which will allow viewers to pause television and click-through to AT&T's promotional videos.

Davina Lynn Kent, vice president, national advertising sales at TiVo, said adding fantasy football was another way to attempt to pull in more subscribers. "This is one of the unique things that you can't get on another DVR," she said. Other broadband services TiVo offers include Yahoo Photos, which lets subscribers view photos stored in Yahoo Photos on their TVs, movie listings, weather, and Internet radio.

Kent noted, however, that AT&T's sponsorship of SportsLine fantasy football was the first ad sponsorship of a third-party broadband content on TiVo.

Earlier this week, TiVo and CBS announced that TiVo subscribers would be able to see CBS's comedy "The Class" up to a week before its Sept. 18 premiere.