Wireless Sports a New Service

Baseball strike notwithstanding, sports fans may have a new reason to rejoice. Motorola has announced a new EMBARC wireless service that brings up-to-the-minute sports information to a pager or suitably equipped mobile computer.

The service, dubbed the Wireless Sports Channel (WSC), uses Motorola’s Electronic Mail Broadcast to a Roaming Computer service that already delivers messages and other data to mobile users.

Motorola feels that people will be interested in the service for several reasons, but most of them seem to be centered around the true sports fan that closely follows his or her team. For these people, WSC provides near real-time updates of score and other information for baseball, pro and college football and basketball, and hockey. Users have the option to select and filter the kind of information transmitted.

Prices for the service range from $9.95 per month for basic sporting information, to $49.99 for an extended news service that users can receive on their laptop computer. Motorola also offers a $99 pager-like message receiver called Sports To Go for people lacking any type of receiving device.

EMBARC is an advanced paging service that transmits data at 1200 bps throughout the United States. Laptop or PDA users employ a Motorola Newsstream PCMCIA Type II device to receive and view the information.

The Wireless Sports Channel is the first of several news services that Motorola plans to offer using its EMBARC system, which they will market under the moniker Wireless Broadcast Network (WBN).

EMBARC
1500 N.W. 22nd Avenue
Boynton Beach, FL 33426-8292
1-800-EMBARC4