The annual postseason college football game played in St. Petersburg, Florida will for the next four years be known as the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl as part of a sponsorship deal signed between bitcoin payment processor BitPay and ESPN Events.
The arrangement marks one of the most high-profile marketing initiatives yet for a bitcoin-related business and comes as the digital currency continues to gradually make inroads into mainstream commerce.
In an announcement Wednesday, BitPay and ESPN Events, a subsidiary of sports network ESPN, said the name change would take effect at this year's Dec. 26 game and would continue each year through the 2016 game.
The game will air on ESPN. Tickets, which start at $40 each, and associated merchandise will also be available for purchase with bitcoin through Bitpay's processing services.
The St. Petersburg game, which previously bore the name of the Beef O'Brady's chain of sports-themed restaurants, is in its first year of a new college football affiliation with the Atlantic Coast Conference and the American Athletic Conference, each of which will field a team for this year's event.
BitPay's foray into college football sponsorship coincides with a new drive toward bitcoin adoption by retailers and other merchants. Over the past three weeks, satellite TV provider Dish Network and travel site Expedia Inc. have both announced they would accept bitcoin.
In the six months before that, businesses such as online retailer Overstock.com Inc., NBA team the Sacramento Kings and space-tourism provider Virgin Galactic started accepting the digital currency.
Though the deal is the first bitcoin sponsorship for a televised U.S. sporting event, it isn't the first connected to a digital currency. Those honors go to a currency known as dogecoin, which promotes itself via an Internet meme image of a shiba inu dog.
Dogecoin sponsored Nascar's Josh Wise at Alabama's Talladega Superspeedway on May 4. The sponsorship deal cost $55,000, with the funds raised via donations from dogecoin enthusiasts that were denominated in the digital currency.
SOURCE "
http://online.wsj.com/articles/bitpay-to-sponsor-st-petersburg-bowl-in-first-major-bitcoin-sports-deal-1403098202"
I'll lock this one.
