ESPN.com, MSN tie up for online sports coverage

NEW YORK: All-sports cable network ESPN said on Thursday its

online service would be the sole provider of sports information to

Microsoft Corp's Internet portal MSN.

Visitors to MSN can click from MSN's Hotmail email service to

ESPN's online sports site, ESPN.com, and then back to Hotmail.

ESPN.com can be placed on an MSN user's personalized home page, the

companies said.

The move is part of Microsoft's plan to make MSN a more

comprehensive destination for Web users and compete with pages such

as Yahoo! Inc. and subscriber-based services such as America Online,

a unit of AOL Time Warner. ESPN is majority-owned by Walt Disney Co .

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.