More than a half million Paging Network Inc. customers started receiving news briefs from CNN Interactive for free last week.
Subscribers to PageNet’s alphanumeric service, via Motorola Inc.’s Advisor and Advisor Gold pagers, receive news updates every half hour.
CNN broadcasts between six and eight entries in each of eight news categories, including the world, United States, stock market, sports, weather, features and entertainment.
The relationship between Dallas-based PageNet and CNN of Atlanta is mutually exclusive, and long term. The companies would not specify the length of their agreement nor the financial details involved, but clearly both stand to benefit from the new relationship.
PageNet gains by association with CNN’s image as a quality and leading news source. The CNN news feed is offered for free, which makes customers happy and differentiates PageNet in the marketplace beyond typical service evaluators like coverage, price and transmission quality.
Further, the partnership provides for a number of future service possibilities, including localized news, interactive news via two-way messaging and transmission of graphics, explained Don Shirley, PageNet’s director of technology solutions.
Paging is a new medium for CNN to disseminate information. And the messaging service complements CNN Interactive online World Wide Web site. In addition, the basics of technology and mechanics for the paging news feed already existed.
But is alphanumeric service really used by that many people? PageNet says yes and industry estimates suggest the same. The Dallas paging carrier reports its alphanumeric customer base tripled in the last two years from 193,000, or 4 percent of all customers, at the end of 1994, to more than 600,000, or 8 percent of all customers today. Industry estimates 20 percent of new orders for one-way paging service in the United States are alphanumeric.
Increased capacity gained from using FLEX technology means alphanumeric service makes more sense in managing spectrum, explained PageNet spokesman Scott Baradell. Previously, numeric service was marketed more heavily because significantly more subscribers could ride in the same amount of room as one alpha user.
“We believe this type of value-added service will significantly drive the growth of the alphanumeric paging market,” commented Glenn Marschel, PageNet president and chief executive officer.
Both CNN and PageNet have hot links between one another’s Web sites.
CNN broadcasts news over PageNet’s frequencies 24 hours a day, seven days a week and stories are updated every half hour between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. eastern time, Monday through Friday. Outside those hours, news is updated hourly, said CNN.
CNN Interactive has a staff of more than a dozen people-dedicated only to PageNet-to compose news.
Each news brief includes a headline and about three or four lines of key story information. If coverage of a particular event is ongoing, each half hour an updated brief replaces the previous brief on the event.
CNN’s service replaces PageNet’s previous news service, Datacast, launched almost three years ago. CNN’s content is perceived by PageNet as more newsworthy, said the company.
