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 sites it’s bought with its “ESPN” prefix… ESPNSoccernet.com, ESPNScrum.com, ESPNCricinfo.com, so it’s no surprise that the Racing-Live.com brand, which was started in 1995, has been killed off.
It comes a week after ESPN launched the the UK-facing content portal, ESPN.co.uk, we first revealed in September it would create to go along with its new UK soccer and other TV rights.
ESPN holds no online broadcast rights in Britain, but, after several months using its .co.uk merely as a shop window for its pay-TV products, it’s begun publishing textual news stories of its own, some wire copy, plus scores and fixtures from its existing content.