AOL and ESPN Sign Agreement for Sports News and Highlights
While AOL video is largely female-focused, the company announced an agreement today that should pull in more male viewers. AOL has signed an agreement with ESPN that will bring the majority of ESPN's online videos to AOL's viewers. The content includes news, highlights, and analysis videos. The content sharing began two days ago.
Under the deal, ESPN will deliver videos for a variety of sports to AOL, including clips from "SportsCenter" and its other programs. AOL will then syndicate that content to its own sites (including AOL.com and The Huffington Post), as well as its network of over 1,7000 partner sites (partners include Cox, Gannett, and the Boston Globe). AOL's video hub, AOL On, will create a new channel for the ESPN content. (AOL On launched last year to provide a central destination for all of AOL's video content.) Content will be viewable on computers, mobile devices, and connected TVs. Relevant videos will also be included in AOL sports articles.
ESPN will be responsible for selling ads on the shared videos. Revenue from the ads will be split between the two companies, as well as the syndication partners.
According to the latest comScore rankings, AOL is now the second largest content video publisher online, trailing only Google sites.
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