Sports Goes Mobile through Mazingo Deal with Fox Sports

The stereotypical sports fan stays glued to the tube or car radio, reluctant to stray until he’s caught all the day’s final scores. Yet, slowly but surely, backseat quarterbacks are moving away from the davenport into the digital realm.

A new offering by mobile entertainment network, Mazingo.net, to provide Fox Sports video content through its subscription based Mazingo Digital Video Package is the latest indicator of an ongoing shift in how sports enthusiasts get their game on. The $14.95/mo. service delivers about 1600 high quality video news, weather and entertainment shows to subscribers’ PDAs. Updated a few times each day, Fox Sports interviews, game highlights and other programming excerpts will help round out Mazingo’s sports content which until now has been provided by Sporting News Radio only.

“People want digital entertainment on their mobile devices,” says Carmine Gallo, VP strategic alliances at Mazingo. “It’s a lot more than a calendar and an address book; it’s a mobile entertainment device.”

Besides making it “that much more worthwhile” for PDA users to subscribe to the Mazingo service, Gallo sees the arrangement as both a new window of content distribution and a new revenue stream for Fox Sports. Another plus for Fox Sports: content delivered through the Mazingo service is copy protected, meaning it can’t be played on devices other than the one onto which its been downloaded.

Fox Sports distributes its sports video content via the Web through RealNetworks’ $9.95/mo. RealOne SuperPass product. The company also appeals to the on-the-go fantasy gamer by adapting its online baseball game, Hit the Pros, for wireless devices. The game utilizes data from live games. “You can bat against an actual pitch that Randy Johnson threw to, say, Barry Bonds,” explains FOXSports.com manager, business development, Debra Bedding, who stresses that the company is “continuously developing new ideas for wireless given the burgeoning marketplace.”

For the past two years, ESPN.com sports headlines, summary digests, and scores have been mobile through the Verizon Wireless Mobile Web service. And CBS SportsLine.com provides its content to subscribers of the Nextel Wireless Web Service. Mobile sports audio and video, on the other hand, still has a ways to go. In October of last year, worldwide sports content provider, IMG, took the lead by striking a deal with Nokia to deliver customized, ad-supported, sports audio, images and text over their MMS (Mobile Multimedia Services) phones.

Others, including Mazingo, are holding off on wireless distribution, believing that the rich media promise of third generation wireless devices just isn’t here yet. The firm’s Digital Video Package is not wireless; rather, it requires subscribers to download selected files to their handheld devices through syncing. Files are specifically formatted for the user’s device and automatically refreshed each time syncing occurs.

The Fox Sports product will be promoted on FoxSports.com as well as the Lycos Network, and throughout Fox’s on-air networks. Dedicated emails sent by Fox Sports will also announce the offering to over 600,000 consumers. Mazingo’s hardware partners including Palm, Sharp and Microsoft’s Pocket PC will tout the service as well.

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