Sports Fans Get A ‘Voice’ And Live Football On The Net
Published 27th February 2006
· Sportal.com to stream World Cup warm up match live on Tuesday night and publicise it in 200 countries worldwide using WhitePhone CastAlive technology
· Sportal.com and Voice Commerce team up to offer sports enthusiasts free calls, voice and video messages online
London, 27th February 2006 – Leading sports website, Sportal.com has reached an agreement with the Voice Commerce Group to deploy its WhitePhone and CastAlive technology, which will be used to promote the broadcast of a World Cup Group 2 warm up match on Tuesday 28th February.
Sportal.com becomes the first sports content publisher to take advantage of the WhitePhone Desktop VoIP based technology to offer its web site visitors a unique online communications experience. Sportal.com now provides a fully branded, VoIP-enabled service called Sportaltalk that offers a unique range of interactive content and internet telephony services including:
Video Casts and access to live sports events
Free PC-to-PC calls
Low cost phone calls to any phone globally
Video and Voice messaging to allow Sportaltalk customers to share and talk about the sports they enjoy even while the events are on
Sportal.com has also become the first customer to use the Voice Commerce CastAlive Technology to broadcast a video announcement across the whole WhitePhone Network – 200 countries worldwide. The video announcement promotes a unique and exclusive live IPTV broadcast of the World Cup warm up match between Trinidad & Tobago and Iceland at Loftus Road, home of Queens Park Rangers, at 8pm on Tuesday 28th February. The game can be viewed on Sportal.com and through the WhitePhone Desktop.
Peter Lewinton of Sportal.com said “We’re excited to be working with Voice Commerce. Sportaltalk adds another dimension to our internet publishing and gives our customers access to really useful technology. Now our users can chat online whilst viewing the latest sports content, completely free of charge. We expect that using WhitePhone will help us to build stronger relationships with our customers and build differentiation to our sports publishing business. Moreover, CastAlive will help us with rich media advertising and promotion of future events to a worldwide audience.”
President of the Voice Commerce Group, and founder of WorldPay, Nick Ogden commented: “We’re delighted to be teaming up with Sportal.com. The website already offers a great range of visual sports news and by integrating Sportaltalk into the mix, users will benefit from a more complete online experience. Using CastAlive to broadcast a trailer for the football match on Tuesday night extends the reach of the Sportal.com live IPTV broadcast, which our network customers can also watch though their desktop technology. We are adding around one new major media publisher a week to our network and growing a global network of end users who benefit from a complete communications desktop integrated with web browsers and video technologies.”
The Voice Commerce Group predicts that many website publishers will start to change to incorporate integrated voice and video technologies linked to desktop applications that are appropriate to consumers or business users. Voice commerce provides the tools that enable any e-business to voice enable its website, offering their customers a dynamic new online experience, designed to simply mirror the way in which we all interact in our normal lives.