Verizon Now Sponsoring NFL Teams; Announced Day After The Exclusive Sprint Deal

The timing and the move is sure to raise some eyebrows (unless I am missing something here): A day after Sprint Nextle announced a big, $600 million exclusive deal with NFL for a five year sponsorship and content deal, Verizon Wireless has announced a direct deal with 13 NFL teams. As part of its team sponsorship, the carrier will offer fans Info Alerts that will deliver exclusive team news from a given team’s coaching staff and front office. Verizon Wireless also will offer local text messaging sweepstakes, among other offers.
As Techdirt points out, exclusive content deals in the mobile arena don’t make a lot of sense, at least in these early days of consumer adoption. “Fans get less content, the NFL has fewer fans able to pay attention to the content and the mobile operators upset users who start wondering why these operators are limiting them.”
But then again, these exclusive deals a particular feature of nascent industry life-cycle, where distributors always try to lock in their early incumbent advantages…it happened where ISPs tried it back in the days, and we know where that went…

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