WatchESPN is quite possibly the final frontier in ESPN being everywhere you need it to be. Already on your TV, Internet, radio, fantasy sports leagues and quite possibly your breakfast cereal, there wasn’t much ground left for the network to cover. But with WatchESPN, now you can get the full ESPN broadcast experience directly on your iPhone, provided you have a subscription to a cable TV package that carries ESPN.
WatchESPN is specifically available to customers of Time Warner, Comcast, Bright House, Verizon FiOS or Verizon High Speed with ESPN cable subscriptions at the moment, which should cover quite a bit of the U.S. cable viewing population. The app itself works pretty much like you’d imagine.
The app supports 4 ESPN channels: ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPN 3 and ESPN U, along with “Buzzer Beater” a channel that hosts live look-ins for close contests. Each of these channels is represented in the app’s handful of tabs. There’s a tab with featured games, a tab to search for programming by sport, another to search by channel and finally a keyword search where you can keep on the lookout for anything not covered in the previous options.
It may not sound like much, and certainly WatchESPN isn’t exactly full of surprises, but as a vehicle to bring the ESPN TV programming to your iPhone, it works quite effectively. The broadcast is smooth and lag free on a Wi-Fi signal. If you’re in a bind somewhere without a TV and you really want to catch a game, WatchESPN is an excellent choice. It’s a shame there isn’t an option to purchase the channels on the app if you don’t already have a cable package. For sports fans that have already “cut the cord” the app turns into a simple list of ESPN programming without the live streaming.
Find great games for iOS here
