NFL action aplenty, right on the cellphone
If Mom won't let you leave the Thanksgiving table, there's now another way to keep on top of the Colts-Lions and Cowboys-Bears matchups today: your cellphone.
Latching onto the exploding growth of mobile phones as entertainment devices, the National Football League has rolled out a host of wireless services this season. A scaled-down version of its NFL.com website, designed for tiny cellphone screens, offers up-to-the-minute scores.
Besides giving mobile fans another way to check results, the league also offers pure-entertainment features as well, such as star player "ring tones." For a price of generally $2, these tones replace the conventional phone ring with the sound of players such as Kansas City Chiefs tight end Tony Gonzalez and New York Giants defensive end Michael Strahan shouting: "Pick up your phone! It's game time!"
"Fantasy football" participants who have created teams with players from multiple NFL squads can also get updates sent as text messages to their cellphones showing how their imaginary squads are performing. If Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning or Chicago Bears running back Thomas Jones scores today, for example, alerts will go out in seconds to phones of NFL fantasy fans who have registered their teams and phone numbers at the NFL website.
The NFL's cellphone ventures are growing so rapidly that by the 2006 or 2007 season, some league officials think, wireless could generate as much profit as conventional services delivered through league Web pages and the associated advertising. NFL Web offerings include a $35-a-season Field Pass that gives users access to live radio accounts of 250 games and video highlights on their personal computers.
Pro football's ventures into wireless are "in many ways just the beginning," said Chris Russo, the NFL's senior vice president for new media. "We expect continued growth over the next two or three years, and wireless has the potential to equal or exceed what we're doing on the Internet."
Russo declined to offer specifics, but people familiar with the NFL's online operations estimate they currently gross about $140 million, yielding annual profits of $35 million to $40 million. Wireless offers will likely be more limited and attract fewer users than NFL-sponsored websites, but wireless services -- such as 99-cent downloads of team logos as phone-screen "wallpapers" -- can generate net income comparable to what the league makes on the Net because the wireless profit margins are so much fatter.
Last year's Patriots-Carolina Panthers Super Bowl was the first for which the NFL let fans cast votes for the game's most valuable player by cellphone as well as online, and 40,000 of the 500,000 votes cast came from wireless users. Fans this fall can vote via text message for which players should go to the post-season Pro Bowl.
"Down the road you may see more live audio, video highlights, and multimedia entertainment," Russo said. "As more and more people have advanced phones, we'll be rolling those out within the next two years."
Along with the NFL, Major League Baseball, and the National Basketball Association have also heard the siren call of wireless. During the last season, a mobile.mlb.com site designed to be displayed on cellphones offered up-to-the-minute, play-by-play accounts of all baseball games live. Fans can also pay $2.49 apiece to download team logos as wallpaper from baseball's website, mlb.com. The images work on most phone screens.
This month, the NBA Unwired service went live, offering video highlights on certain high-end
Over the past year, carriers including
This fall,
Qualcomm last year bought the nationwide rights to broadcast over television channel 55. It envisions forming joint ventures with cellphone companies to sell, by 2006 or 2007, a new generation of phones with multiple receiver chips that get their voice and data access from the carrier, but their TV images from Qualcomm's MediaFLO service. Live sports, including football, are seen as a leading potential service.
"Wireless has the potential of ultimately becoming a new distribution medium that is a step beyond TV and another real way for leagues to generate revenue," said Michael Grossi, a principal wireless analyst with Boston consulting firm Adventis. "One of the underlying drivers is that people are becoming more mobile, and they are not tethered in front of their televisions or computers watching the game. It's also part of how the cellphone is continually becoming more and more of an entertainment device, not just a communications device."
Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com.
