A whole new ballgame

As Houston Astros fans follow second baseman Craig Biggio's quest for 3000 career hits this season, they can also experience another first of its kind for the organization: Bluecasting.

Bluecasting, which utilizes Bluetooth wireless technology, has been made available at the team's home field, Minute Maid Park, through a partnership with Kinetic, an outdoor advertising agency that focuses on using mobile technology. The service makes the Astros the first professional sports team in the U.S. to enable downloading of exclusive content on mobile devices inside its stadium.

“Because we're an outdoor agency, we feel that the mobile phone, which is becoming much more of a personal lifestyle device, fits most naturally with our home,” said Ben Kennedy, director of business development for Kinetic.

Kennedy said Kinetic first began its work in mid-2006 with the Astros in a effort to bring the team's marketing department personnel up-to-speed on mobile technology in general and the plusses and minuses of using various types of mobile advertising campaigns to reach out to the team's fans: text messaging, wireless application protocol, etc. The Astros liked Bluetooth the best, he said.

“We think that Bluetooth is very much the first guest at the party,” Kennedy said. “It will do its job, and its job will be to get the public engaged with being able to download things onto their cell phones.”

The Astros and Kinetic placed three servers high in the rafters above the concourse at Minute Maid Park. These communicate with a central server located in San Francisco, which sends content back to Houston. The stadium servers then locate and transmit that content to Bluetooth-enabled devices in Bluetooth zones the team has designated at two restaurants inside Minute Maid Park.

Fans can then download Astros pictures, promotions, wallpaper and exclusive team content to their mobile phones, as well as ticket, merchandise and sponsor offers, interactive applications and links. The team sent out a special wallpaper showing Astros players on opening day this year to kick off the service and the season, Kennedy said.

That content can be forwarded on to other users via text or e-mail, he said. Kennedy hopes that, as the Astros' 2007 season progresses, the team's fans will come to the park anticipating new exclusive content to download, much like collecting baseball cards.

Though he ultimately sees Bluetooth as a terminal technology, which will yield to better methods of wireless communications, Kennedy feels the Astros are priming their audience for those more advanced forms of mobile content delivery coming along in the future.

“What the Astros get is regular interaction with their fans,” he said. “But they get to build a real fan profile of back data, which they can use to talk more directly to them on a level where they'll be receptive.”