Mobile ESPN to launch this weekend

The service has been available for months from Best Buy in four markets and from its Web portal everywhere else, but this Sunday Mobile ESPN will “officially” launch, timing its first major TV advertising blitz with--what else?--the Superbowl.

ESPN will be buying the most expensive ad time in the world, paying for 60-second commercial spots during Superbowl XL. The ads will feature more than 20 professional athletes across the spectrum of men’s and women’s professional sports.

Though the advertising blitz starts Sunday when the phones go onto Best Buy shelves across the country, the service has been readily available on www.mobileespn.com since the holidays. ESPN has also been advertising and selling the service at Best Buys in four trial markets since Nov. 1: Austin and San Antonio, Texas; Minneapolis; and Reno, Nevada.

The new MVNO is taking a different approach from other virtual carriers to hit the market. While competitors are targeting the prepaid or youth markets with low-cost plans, ESPN’s cheapest plan starts at $65 a month. It’s going specifically after heavy mobile content users, and a lot of sports video and data content is automatically included with the lowest tier of service.

Contrast that to another mobile content-centric MVNO, Amp’d Mobile, which is also in its soft-launch period. Its service is focused on the young hipster rather than the rabid sports fan, and its plans reflect a more customizable and price-conscious tastes. The cheapest Amp’d plan starts at $30 a month and includes a limited ‘welcome’ package of content--a ringtone, an MP3, a wallpaper--but the menu of choices for other services is quite staggering. Customers can download individual songs from the site, can select from a wide range of style and music applications or add services like unlimited text messaging or push-to-talk to the service—all for ever-increasing incremental fees.