This is a story that we’ve been following at Awful Announcing going back a couple of months. On Friday, Disney announced a number of new digital and mobile projects that will effect several of its divisions including ESPN.
The ESPN announcement came from John Kosner, the company’s executive vice president of digital and print media. He noted that there will be a new ESPN.com coming in April 2015. Kosner said the site will look cleaner, be simpler which would be more user friendly and allow for more personalization. In addition, the site will be geared more for mobile users who are getting a bigger share of the web traffic.
Janko Roettgers of Gigaom gave the world the first look at the new ESPN.com:
https://twitter.com/jank0/status/533326442235297792
Users can also expect that a rebranding of the SportsCenter app which will be known as “ESPN.”
This is part of Disney strategy to stay on top of the digital wave. CEO Robert Iger unveiled several new initiatives on Friday including a sales of Disney films on Walmart’s streaming service, Vudu and a new children’s learning app.
ESPN.com has undergone various changes over the years, but this appears to be the biggest one. We’ll get more details as we get closer to the relaunch, however, as mobile phones gain more share of the traffic, sites are adapting. Now whether this will make users step up and notice is another thing.
