EarthLink to offer for-pay sports portal

EarthLink today launched a premium sports content portal with partner Synacor, offering its customers a portfolio of enhanced multimedia content for a monthly subscription fee.

The initiative is EarthLink’s first in the pay-for-content space. Though it offers enhanced services such as Vonage’s VoIP service and a home-networking installation and management service, EarthLink and few other ISPs had yet to proffer up pure Web content for a price.

Synacor’s sports portal brings together dozens of free and subscription-based content services into one site, offering things such as live GPS tracking of NASCAR racer positions and live audio feeds from the drivers’ helmets as well as exclusive interviews and features about baseball, football, hockey and other sports teams. The portal also has built-in fantasy sports games and other interactive features.

While all of the content is available separately from separate sources, the EarthLink premium sports channel compiles them all on one site, demanding no extra registration or switching between sites, and offering a steep discount on cost. A subscription to the EarthLink service costs $9.95 a month, while the individual services bought separately would cost as much as $40 a month, an EarthLink spokesman said.

"Part of the appeal of this product is it brings all of this content together," the spokesman said. "This is premium content. This is stuff you can’t get for free."

While it may be the first premium content service, it won’t be EarthLink’s last. The ISP, which resells the broadband services of DSL and cable modem providers, is investigating other market segments, though it has not made any firm decisions as to which type of premium content to offer next.