Though it's been around a while, most people never heard of
ESPN360 until the World Cup, where all of the games were live broadcasted for
free directly on the service. ESPN 360 (an on demand sports content and
highlight broadband site) has existed, though, for a while, with unfortunately
little use. The problem? They require broadband providers, such as
Comcast or TimeWarner, to purchase the service for their users.
Unfortunately, the people they want to purchase the service have little
incentive to do so; there isn't much competition in the broadband arena,
because there aren't too many options where anyone lives for high-speed
internet. Because of that, a small service like ESPN 360 will never be
important enough to tip the inelastic market and cause providers to feel they
need to pay the money to win over some customers. Instead, the service
has relatively little roll out, and customers don't get the benefit of what
could be a great service. If this was packaged into a premium insider service,
something that ESPN charges customers directly for, there might see some
serious roll out.
