ESPN Mobile is shutting down. Wow - think of the wasted ad spend (at least $30M). If you watch any ESPN, you've seen wall-to-wall ads for this service for the past 4 months. The main problem was that it was too expensive.

My intuition is also that the phones aren't good enough - reception and video quality still suck. At least that's what the perception is.

The speed at which this got de-commissioned is impressive. Search Views writes:

The failure of ESPN Mobile brings up new hesitations for other companies developing mobile media products.

Probably due to the incessant ads that flooded the ESPN Zone, some bloggers are deriving snarky hathos from corporate failure of this kind.

I wonder how long it will be til something decentralized and free succeeds in its place? Think YouTube for phones. I'm guessing 1 year...

¶ 9/29/2006