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Fanatic App Tells Out of Town Fans Where to Go

August 20, 2013 by 1 Comment

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Have you ever traveled to a distant city and been forced to miss watching your favorite team play because you did not want to watch the game in a sports bar filled with hostile fans? Well Fanatic has developed an app that helps like minded fans find each other and enjoy a game together.

The company is actually delivering its second iteration of the app, it first hit the market with a version that only supported iOS digital mobile devices late last January and now has expanded into the Android space as well.

The concept is very simply. A fan of a team, or league, can search for the top venues to watch that team in a specific city. So a Bears fan in Charlotte could seek out a bar that caters to fans that root for the team. Rankings will rise and fall as Fanatic users recommend sites for other fans. It recommends specific venues nearby based on a user’s location, sports interests and the team ranking of those venues.

It feature top venues for a wide range of leagues including NCAA football and basketball, the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and MLS, along with the top European soccer leagues, including the English Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Serie A and the UEFA Champions League.

The company is currently developing a system that will have specific rewards for users. You will earn points for usage for such things as checking in and at some future time they will be redeemable for specific prizes.

This seems like a very good mixture of social media and sports, and as any fan that has been in a different city and wanted to watch their home team knows, some bars are hostile to out of town fans and some cater to them, the difficulty is finding them.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Barclays English Premier League, Baseball, Basketball, BCS, Fanatic Fans, iOS, iPad, iPhone, Major League Baseball, NBA, NCAA Football, NCAA Hoops, NCAA.com, NFL, NHL, Soccer, The Ligue de Football Professionnel Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Sportsmanias.com Gains Funding: Rolls Out New Team-Focused App

August 15, 2013 by 1 Comment

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Sports news aggregator startup Sportsmanias has raised $1 million in venture funding as it seeks to expand its reach by providing a new team-focused sports app that will enable users to track hard news about their favorite teams by focusing on news and reports from team beat writers.

The recent $1 million investment has come from Mas Equity Partners, which is led by founder Jorge Mas, who also serves as Chairman of the Board of MasTec, a $4 billion infrastructure engineering and construction company based in Coral Gables, Fla.

Sportsmanias.com, founded just last fall, has an existing web site and app that serves as a news aggregator for all major US sports including NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and the NCAA. In addition it covers a wide variety of domestic and international soccer news, teams and leagues. The news feed that a user gets can be customized to meet their sporting preferences. The company was founded by the mother/son team of Aymara Del Aguila, an advertising executive and son Vicente J. Fernandez, a student-athlete and sports writer at the University of Chicago.

Now the company has enhanced its presence in the mobile digital world with an updated free app for both iOS and Android powered devices. The Team News app will focus on providing news that has been originated by beat writers that regularly cover the team, rather than just culling all news stories that are generated about a team across the nation, often from sources that do not have direct contact and coverage of the team.

The app does not just exclusively provide beat reporter news on a specific team. It also provides team and player tweets. Two interesting features are the Rumor Filter, which collects league and team-specific rumors from top rumor sites, and a Video Filter, which aggregates footage from YouTube and Twitter.

These features have the ability to data mine rumors and videos in real time so that a fan can be up-to-date on what is going on as well as what is suspected to be about to happen. Other new features for the app include a scoreboard to follow ongoing games, and keyword search capabilities.

The company said that it currently is getting 500,000 unique visitors to its web site monthly and that with the new features and capabilities of its app it expects that it will see a strong jump to 1.5 million monthly visitors by year end.

The upgrades look to be a very good move by the company because increasingly flexibility and customization are now becoming standard in sports apps. The rumor and video filters are solid features that will help them create separation from many of the current apps that are now available, as many as just text based, and any rumors tend to be generated in house. However the need for these features, particularly video is obvious and others are headed in this direction.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Basketball, English Premier Soccer League, FIFA, Golf, iOS, Live sports via mobile, Major League Baseball, MLS, NBA, NCAA Football, NCAA Hoops, NCAA.com, NFL, NHL, Soccer, Sports Social Media Data, Startup, Tablets, YouTube Tagged With: , , , , , ,

CBS Sports App Finally Supports Video, Tablets

August 14, 2013 by 1 Comment

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CBS Sports has updated its app (v.6.0) and brings much needed new features including tablet support as well as live video which will be added to its existing sports scores, stats and other information that it had previously supplied.

The old version of CBS Sports’ app could be viewed as a sort of dinosaur, apparently designed at a time when its developers believed that all a user needed on a mobile device was access to a web site for the information that they were seeking.

The addition of live sports video really was a necessity since there are other options, usually specific to one sport such as MLB At Bat that already offer sports highlights. Also by adding tablet support it reaches a huge new audience that surveys show often use a tablet when watching sports for additional information.

The live video will cover the PGA tour, NCAA basketball, and SEC football with additional on-demand options. You can also get personalized push notifications and it includes both CBS branded commentary and news content but also has the ability to add a Twitter feed focused on a favorite team that will include outside reporters, news services and fan commentary.

Aside from these additions the app still includes a huge range of other information that sports fans seek such as scores and stats from Pro and college football, MLB, NBA and NCAA hoops, NHL, PGA, NASCAR, F1 and a wide range of soccer including (Premier League, MLS, Champions League, Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A, Europa League, Ligue 1, Scottish Premier, Dutch Eredivisie, Mexican Primera, Brazilian Serie A, and Argentina Primera.

There will also be special features regarding major sporting events such as the NFL draft and a number of CBS Sports programming will be available such as Jim Rome’s show.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Barclays English Premier League, Baseball, Basketball, CBS Sports, FIFA, Golf, Live sports via mobile, Major League Baseball, NASCAR, NBA, NCAA Football, NCAA Hoops, NFL, NHL, Soccer, The Ligue de Football Professionnel Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Friday Grab Bag: MSG to Close? NASCAR on the Move

July 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Hewlett-Packard may be looking to double down in the tablet space as rumors are emerging that the company, already having re-entered the space, is now looking to head to the low end by offering an affordable $99 tablet.

According to DigiTimes, HP will team with Walmart to sell the 7-inch tablet that HP will have built in China. It will be targeted at the back to school market and will be the second offering in the 7-inch space from the company.

NASCAR on the move-to NBC
NASCAR and broadcaster NBC have signed a multiyear, multi-billion dollar deal that will see the racing league move from its longtime homes of ESPN and Turner Sports, while Fox Sports will maintain its portion of the coverage.

The details of the deal have not been released but Sports Business Daily has said that it is estimated that the deal is 50% greater than the existing deal that was valued at $2.74 billion for 8 years. The new deal will start with the 2015 season.

Will 2022 World Cup move to November?
If you wondered why FIFA awarded the 2020 World Cup to Qatar, a nation that being in the desert tends to be very hot during the summer when the tournament is played you were not alone. Now FIFA appears to be rethinking its clever plan.

Increasingly reports are emerging that the governing body is looking to move the tournament to the fall or winter so that it does not have dozens of players falling from heat stroke. However this will have a huge impact on most of the major European leagues’ seasons so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Nate Silver to ESPN
Stats guru Nate Silver has just moved to ESPN, leaving the New York Times. Silver cut his teeth in sports prior to moving to the Times and developed PECOTA, something that most baseball fantasy players will be aware of.

Hopefully in his new role he can help bring realistic use of statistics to the World Wide Leader. Does anybody really follow its quarterback rating system and does anybody remember its ill-fated productive out stat? Here is an interesting look at some areas he has impacted in the past and could in the future.

Madison Square Garden to close in 10 years?
Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks’ home, is slated to close in 10 years as New York is looking to renovate Penn Station, the mass transit terminal upon which sits the sports arena. Currently Penn Station is the busiest transportation hub in the United States.

The news cannot come as good news to the team which has been in the midst of a 3-year renovation that, according to Yahoo, will cost an estimated $968 million. The team had been applying for a permanent permit for the arena.

Filed Under: Android, Basketball, ESPN, ESPN FC, FIFA, Fox Sports, Hewlett-Packard, NASCAR, NBA, Soccer, Tablets, The New York Times, Yahoo Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

NBA Fans Leap onto Digital Bandwagon with Soaring Viewership

June 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment

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As we mentioned a few weeks ago the NBA has moved to provide access to its playoffs to a wide variety of platforms including iOS mobile devices, PCs and Kindles. The results are now in and it has resulted in record setting traffic.

The push was done by NBA Digital, a group that is jointly managed by the league and Turner Sports and resulted in the just concluded NBA Championship series having an all time cross platform consumption for the league across its properties that include NBA TV, NBA.com, NBA LEAGUE PASS, NBA LEAGUE PASS Broadband, NBA Mobile, NBADLEAGUE.com, and WNBA.com.
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The NBA Mobile had huge increases in page views and video streams with more than 138 million page views, up 91% vs. 2012. There were a total of 4.5 million video streams during the 2013 NBA Finals, which represented a 126% increase over last year. The mobile app that is published by the league, NBA Game Time, had a 110% download increase compared to last years’ finals numbers.

NBA TV’s NBA GameTime experienced all time viewership as well with an average of 128,000 total viewers for both shows, numbers that represent a 28% increase compared with last year.

Hopefully this is a trend for the future among all sports. MLB has embraced mobile access for years while the NFL seems stuck with an older, much less encompassing model. As users continue to cut off cable and broadcast television and rely on Amazon Prime, Netflix and others for much of their viewing options, new methods to gram fans will be needed in the future.

Filed Under: Amazon, Android, Apple, Apps, Basketball, iOS, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, NBA, NBA Game Time, Tablets, Turner Sports Tagged With: , , , ,

CBS Sports Enhances High School Coverage with New Partnerships

May 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

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Increasingly fans are following not just college teams and players but looking at the incoming prep classes and watching where the top high school star athletes end up, and also increasingly this is being catered to by the broadcast networks

The latest to head this way is CBS Interactive which has lined up a pair of partners, 247Sports and MaxPreps.com to enhance its coverage and provide fans with year round coverage in the area of recruitment and emerging stars.

CBS has already had a trial run with 247Sports, teaming with the site for coverage for the 2013 National Signing Day, a partnership that CBS reported had strong viewership. The relationship will have CBSSports.com carry news, analysis and rankings of the Top 247 players in football and basketball.

CBSSports.com will use the content that 247Sports generates to complement its existing coverage of college football and basketball and will be running a web page called “Signing Day”.

The deal with MaxPreps.com provides an additional layer of information for fans, following the athletes during their high school years so that dedicated fans are informed about the quality of the players that are part of the favorite, or arch enemy’s next recruiting class. This will also be carried on line at CBSSports.com, along with blogs and on-demand and live video.

For fans of both high school athletics and collegiate level this looks to be a great place to garner information on teams and players and to hear how future draft classes and individual players are shaping up. With the recent recruiting rule changes from the NCAA, if they are not rescinded, coaches can start contacting players earlier so it will be important for fans to know who the coaches are contacting and what they are capable of doing on the court or field

Filed Under: Athlete to Follow, Basketball, CBS Sports, High School Football, NCAA Football, NCAA Hoops, NCAA.com Tagged With: , , ,
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