Uber and AT&T announced a partnership today that will let riders in select cities stream live college football games from the backseat via built-in tablets. If the score is close, you may never want to get out of that Uber ride again. Reuters explains that the experiment will run across four Saturdays beginning later this month in Detroit, Nashville, Houston and Atlanta. Each city will have 10 Chevrolet Tahoes outfitted with the screens built into the back of headrests. They’ll all be connected to AT&T’s wireless network, with streaming provided via the company’s U-verse TV app. Riders will be able to hail the special vehicles at no extra cost through a separate tab inside Uber’s normal app. The partnership is a way to let people know about its ambitions to roll out more services for Internet-connected cars over the next few years, including more of this kind of video and game content for passengers, AT&T tells Reuters. For Uber, the experiment will give a glimpse into alternative revenue possibilities with sponsorships and advertisements. This is a small scale experiment, so you’ll have to get pretty lucky to stumble across one of these special Ubers. But the ride-sharing company has been known to test new offerings in select markets before launching rapid nation-wide rollouts. UberEATS restaurant delivery service is the latest example, which has grown from just a few markets to 11 cities — including Seattle — over the past few months. Uber has already showed interest in offering entertainment during rides, with a similar Spotify partnership that lets riders listen to music and even an in-car magazine in New York City. It also ran a promotion of a Mad Max video game in Seattle in which customers could hail rides in wildly-decorated vehicles that mimicked the popular movie.
AT&T Inc. announced on Friday that it has partnered with Uber to roll out connected car rides in four American cities for a limited time to let passengers watch college football games live from tablets in the back seat. Under the partnership, ten vehicles with AT&T wireless connectivity will travel around city centres in Detroit, Nashville, Houston and Atlanta on four Saturdays over the next eight weeks. The vehicles will have tablets in the back of headrests, wireless headsets and phone chargers.