With the growth of over-the-top services that let users access the video they want over the internet (and often, for free), those companies offering pay-TV have to look for more bells and whistles to keep fickle consumers interested in their services. The latest offerings in this area come from France…

UK tournament rightsholder ITV (LSE: ITV) will try to reach rugby fans at the office and on mobile because this year’s Rugby World Cup in New Zealand takes place way outside of UK prime time.

Big news for mobile TV pioneer MobiTV: the company has filed for an IPO worth up to $75 million, as it looks for funds to expand internationally, develop its products and potentially size up acquisitions.

A small but significant acquisition for Disney-owned sports network ESPN: it is buying Australian company ExtraCorp Pty. Ltd, owners of the fantasy league and sports tipping site footytips. The deal gives ESPN (NYSE: DIS) a leg up in the world of sporting social media, specifically helping it grow in sports-mad…

Last soccer season, ESPN (NYSE: DIS) debuted ESPN Goals, an iPhone and Android app that, for £3.99 per month or £29.99 annually, offered mobile video highlights within minutes of goals being scored.

Novak Dkojovic and Petra Kvitova weren’t the only winners at Wimbledon this year. Fans who thinking watching sports live matters won big when the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club went with ESPN (NYSE: DIS) as the exclusive rights holder and its massive live schedule for the next 12…

—Angry Birds: Rovio’s hugely successful mobile game may not yet be available on Windows Phone 7 handsets, but it is now making the move to other Windows platforms, and to devices beyond phones. The Angry Birds app for laptops and netbooks running either the Windows 7 or XP operating systems…

With the recent Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) deal as a template, Disney (NYSE: DIS) and Verizon FiOS TV have agreed to extend and expand distribution across platforms. The expanded package covers the Disney and ESPN Media Networks Group and includes:

Sprint (NYSE: S) unveiled a new service today at CTIA called “Sprint ID,” which bundles packs of applications together around a theme, so that first-time smartphone users don’t have to search tirelessly through the Android Market. But Sprint’s real interest is not only about increasing smartphone adoption, but also about…

While other publishers brag about surpassing single-copy sales on the iPad or look for ways to manage subscriptions outside of iTunes, ESPN (NYSE: DIS) is running a different pattern. The Disney sports unit has a number of successful free and one-time purchase apps. But its new ESPN the Magazine iPad…

Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) and the Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) stepped to the precipice of blackout Armageddon—and wisely took a giant step back. Instead of risking their standing with subscribers and viewers, they put away the harsh rhetoric, kept working through the midnight deadline Wednesday and made a…

With the world’s richest soccer league, England’s Premier League, kicking off this weekend, mobile and online are set to play a bigger part than ever this season. ESPN (NYSE: DIS) and Perform Group are launching new pay-for apps, while ESPN has secured more rights to show live matches on TV…

With the World Cup final coming Sunday, ESPN (NYSE: DIS) provided us with an update on how much traffic its digital properties have generated from the tournament to date. In total, ESPN says that a staggering 110,000 people per minute have been using its online and mobile services to access…

How does ESPN (NYSE: DIS) keep its growing empire fed? With deals like the exclusive 12-year pact with the ACC announced today. In exchange for a serious chunk of change—SBJput it at nearly $2 billion or $155 million a year—ESPN gets more than 4,800 events to spread across its various…

ESPN (NYSE: DIS), which has already notched more than six million downloads for its free ScoreCenter app, continues to expand its digital presence on devices with six new mobile apps announced at today’s upfront. Five are actually localized versions of the same one, a free ESPN Local app that will…

First it ate in to Sky’s Premier League lockdown by winning a chunk of live linear rights. Now it’s taken from Sky the mobile highlights rights to all 380 of England’s top-tier soccer matches, beginning from the 2010/11 season’s start, this coming August. ESPN (NYSE: DIS), as a content maker,…

Next stop in ESPN’s European odyssey - new mobile versions of two of its sites. Rugby site ESPNScrum.com and motorsports site ESPNF1.com get the mobile web treatment. The latter is the rebranding we anticipated following ESPN’s acquisition of Racing-Live.com in August 2008. One by one, ESPN (NYSE: DIS) has renamed…

ESPN’s mobile efforts had a stand-out year in 2009. Its ESPN (NYSE: DIS) ScoreCenter was downloaded more than 4.5 million times and was ranked as the top free sports App in iTunes; ESPN was the 8th most-trafficked mobile website, according to Nielsen; and total minutes spent viewing ESPN Mobile TV…

It’s been just over three years since *ESPN* officially pulled the plug on Mobile ESPN (NYSE: DIS), its MVNO (service shut down on Dec 31, 2006), and it’s clear that the company has learned much about what it takes to sustain a successful mobile presence since then. How successful? Find…