Sports.com gets into WAP game

Subscribers to Genie Internet and Motorola's Web W/O Wires Alliance Programme will be able to access Sports.com's new mobile internet site from their WAP-enabled mobile phones. The site will carry news about football, rugby, cricket and Formula One motor-racing, including live match reports, scores and odds. Users will be able to personalise their phones in order to receive updates from particular football matches, for example. Initially, the service will be in English but other European languages will be added.

“We believe that in the next few years more people will be accessing Sports.com by WAP phone than desktop,” said Tom Jessiman, managing director at Sports.com. “We're the most trafficked sports site in Europe. We're the leader in traditional web access through desktop - but it's imperative that we establish that lead in wireless.” The partnership with BT Cellnet and Motorola is non-exclusive and Sports.com's site will be available to all mobile internet users.

Sports.com covers European sports, including football, rugby, Formula One, cricket, tennis and golf as well as all sports in France. Sports.com also provides e-commerce and sports-related online communities - it runs Manchester United's web site and syndicates sports content to Netscape UK, FT.com and France Telecom's Voila and Wanadoo. “They have tremendous depth of coverage,” said Brian Greasley, general manager of Genie Internet.

Earlier this month [February], BSkyB and BT Cellnet announced that they plan to make Sky content, including news and sport, available to Genie Internet subscribers. BT Cellnet, which launched Genie Internet in 1999 as an SMS-based service, introduced a WAP service in January 2000 and will bring in a high-speed GPRS network from summer 2000.