Excite Inc has entered into an alliance with Prodigy Internet Services Corp to provide co-branded content to Prodigy subscribers. The deal will offer Prodigy members Excite’s personalized My Excite channel, which they can use to create custom web content which appears as a default home page when users sign-on. Prodigy users will also have access to custom versions of Excite’s search engine and topically-arranged channels. The arrangement effectively takes Prodigy out of the content business and allows it to focus on growing as a pure ISP. For Excite, the exposure to Prodigy’s one million subscribers helps it in its quest to keep pace with rival Yahoo! Inc, which recently linked up with MCI Corp in a similar content-access deal (CI No 3,325). The two companies will begin offering the joint services in April.
