I attended my first Mobile Monday event last night at the ghost of the old New York Coliseum, where there was a terrific panel discussion on sports sites and the mobile experience. Some extremely valuable nuggets were to be had, the most important of which I thought was the one from Oke Okaro of ESPN that during work hours, everybody's banging away at ESPN.com through their work connections, but during drive times, they switch to their mobile browsers, however gruesome the mobile web experience currently is. ( and you thought the guy reading the paper while driving next to you was scary...)
The next was the global nature of the sports fan, brought home by the NBA's programs in China. Because the mobile web is currently pretty much unusable for rich content, the primary means of sports franchises interacting with their fans mobility-wise is SMS, and one of the chief constraints of that is cost.
These web properties with vast communities of fans that want to interact with them are creatively constrained in the mobile space by the lack of mobile bandwidth and the cost of sending bits/messages back and forth. Evidently, there's a regular "carrier bashing" segment during Mobile Monday events, and this was no exception, except that I found it fascinating that the hostages of the carriers were exhibiting the "Stockholm Syndrome". It would seem to me that the leagues and their franchises could be huge drivers of handset sales and carrier signups, a la the iPhone. There were many gripes about the diversity of device and browser types, and inconsistency of experience. It would seem to me a perfect set of companies to drive unit sales of a multi-radio handheld that combined a cell radio and a wi-fi radio, where they have the huge following to market to, and venues that could easily be wi-fied to make a powerful, high bandwidth mobile experience useable. These guys are content with the carrier's plans for bandwidth and handsets
ESPN's MVNO experience may have been a costly one financially, but I'm sure it provided a huge amount of knowlege in the space and how to do and not do mobile business, so there's some valid reasoning behind those decisions. With video being such a huge part of the sports business, you'd figure these guys would be chomping at the bit to find a way to deliver more of it to their fans accompanied with sponsorship and advertising on a device that rocked. "Nah, we're cool" was the primary reaction.
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