Cingular Wireless, top U.S. mobile service provider, owned by AT&T Inc,is cutting an exclusive content deal with World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. (WWE) to sell everything from ringtones with famous wrestlers’ voices to graphics and videos, including weekly matches and the annual spring tournament, in a move to attract new customers to its wireless services.
John Burbank, vice president of AT&T wireless marketing said, “WWE fans love action — anytime and anyplace. Now, fans can carry the action with them wherever they go, just in time for Wrestlemania.”
Some World Wrestling videos will be available as part of Cingular’s $19.99 a month media service plan and the company will also sell a premium video package for $4.99 a month featuring highlights from WrestleMania and other shows.
Cingular, which is being rebranded as AT&T, will also sell related ringtones for $2.49 each and graphics for $1.99. San Antonio-based AT&T is one of the largest telecommunications holding companies in the world.
Shane McMahon, WWE’s executive vice president, says they will create must-have content for their fans by offering a basic package of short form videos each month along with other content that will enable customers to personalize their mobile experience with the WWE brand.
The company has kicked-off the service yesterday, on phones with high- speed Web links with video clips and there are new features in store to be added in the following months, said Cingular spokesman Mark Siegel.
He believes quite a few of Cingular’s 61 million users are wrestling fans “that this will do very well.”
However WWE’s 15 million weekly viewers are the ones who will ultimately decide if the phone screen can deliver a clear enough image of favorite super and their shapely female counterparts.
So get ready to watch your favorite hulky-bulky professional wrestlers fighting not only in the ring but also fighting for space on the little mobile phone screens.
By Eric ZemanWhile the new gold color sure is purty and would tempt Bond villain Auric Goldfinger himself (and probably Lindsay Lohan), Motorola and its carrier partners should be working on new, innovative handsets and stop with the endless parade of facelifts to a has-been device.At this point, the MOTORAZR has been offered in every color of the rainbow. Originally silver, then black, then pink, blue and some other weird pastels, and most recently red and now gold. Enough already. Time to move on and design something new!Granted, the elite members of society need their mobile phones to be as shiny and unique as possible (think Paris Hilton's diamond-encrusted T-Mobile Sidekick), but a gold RAZR is no longer going to do the trick. Why? Because it's an old, old, old phone. The original RAZR was released in late 2004. True, it has had some nice evolutionary updates, but nothing too radical. You'll be hard pressed to find another handset on the market today that was originally released over 2 years ago. And there's a reason for that.Technology changes and constantly improves. Mobile operators want the newest, latest and greatest devices available on their networks to excite new customers. While the RAZR has demonstrated amazing staying power, it is no longer the market animal it was. Motorola even released the supposed successor to the RAZR, its KRZR (pronounced krazer) handsets last summer. The phones, however, failed to really take off like the RAZR.Motorola dazzled us with the original RAZR and some successive releases like the Q, so we know it can design knock-out phones. My question is, when will it stop milking past successes and create the next revolution in handset design?
