ESPN and PlayStation Vue are hooking up on a campaign around the UEFA European Football Championship that aims to drive up subs for Sony’s OTT-TV service.
Starting June 20, PlayStation Vue will run messaging encourage soccer fans to sign up for a free seven-day trial of the service to watch the tourney, which runs through July 10. The messaging will appear on the PlayStation Vue Hub Feature Tile and via system messages to PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 consoles. ESPN, meanwhile, will run the ads on ESPN.com, ESPNFC.com and espnW.com
Under the marketing partnership, they plan to target consumers who are fans of ESPN but don’t currently have a multichannel pay TV subscription. They said Euro 2016 offers a unique opportunity for the promo due to the non-traditional viewing windows (games for the tourney generally are played outside of U.S. prime time hours). ESPN said its data from the 2014 World Cup also shows that soccer fans gravitated to its WatchESPN offering – in addition to ABC’s telecast, the final match on WatchESPN, for example, generated 1.8 million live unique viewers, 112.1 million live minutes viewed, and was the highest time spent per viewer (63 minutes) of any match of the 2014 World Cup.
The subscription acquisition promo around the tourney follows the launch of ESPN on PlayStation Vue in March as part of a larger carriage deal with ABC and Disney. Also in March, PS Vue launched a set of “Slim” pay TV packages that are available on a national basis.
