Will Earthlink Be the Premium Sports ISP?

It is launching its Earthlink Premium Sports package today, in association with technology/content provider Synacor…see this page

The service will give users access to subscription-only parts of nine popular sports sites. Among the features are real-time audio coverage of all Major League Baseball games; Nascar.com’s TrackPass, which carries audio of conversations between drivers and crews; and PitCommand, which uses the Global Positioning System to follow cars on the track.

Subscribers will pay $9.95 a month – about a quarter of the cost of buying the subscriptions separately, EarthLink said.

Lame Analyst, Lazy Journalist Watch: Well, I’ve harped about lame analysts quotes here before…I’m now going to take the lazy journalists to task, whose first reaction to a story is to call a Jupiter analysts or some such thing, the laziest way to fill up space in a story.

Anyway, this time the Times journalist quotes Jupiter analyst Joe Laszlo. “This isn’t going to increase EarthLink’s broadband subscribership at all,” Mr. Laszlo said. “At best, it’s going to increase the loyalty of the sports fans they already have.” At All? How the hell does he know?

On that note, watch out for a new report on Digital Sports, covering Q1 of this year, later this week…

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