Sports 2.0 Continued: Real-Time Stats and Updates
June 2nd, 2008 | by Brad King |
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I’ve been casually following the court case between major league baseball, the national football league and a fantasy company that has been fighting for the opportunity to sell its statistical products. On June 2, the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to hear the case effectively rendering the lower courts decision that the fantasy company’s rights superseded the rights of the sports leagues to control the players’ names and data.
This from the Associated Press story:
The lawsuit involves C.B.C. Distribution and Marketing Inc., a Missouri company unable to obtain a license from a subsidiary of Major League Baseball to use players’ names in C.B.C.’s fantasy baseball games.
The Missouri company sued, saying it did not need a license to continue to sell its fantasy baseball games on its Web site.
Companies are now free — it would seem — to offer up their own fantasy products without obtaining a license from the professional sports leagues.
I’ve written about what a modern sports page should have — ARG-like games, local high school and college fantasy leagues, What If Sports-type leagues — and now I’m more convinced of that.
But there’s another opportunity as well. Real-time play-by-play.
Modern text messaging systems such as Twitter allow people to post updates as they happen to large groups of people. There’s one local guy who posts updates to the Reds games to Twitter, which is nice when I happen to be out and about. I like having the opportunity to keep up with the game.
But there’s also a company — Stats — that does real-time data updates that are distributed to outlets that have nothing to do with newspapers.
Like any sports reporter, he goes where the action is. But Passman doesn’t fret about finding the right words to lure readers into a story. He doesn’t write for a newspaper, magazine or a blog.
Yet, it’s his account of a ballgame — a detailed report of every pitch thrown — that tells millions of fans all they need to know. Passman’s work, refreshed every minute, is sent to mobile phones, laptops and a host of other gadgets that help a nation of need-it-now sports fans not miss a moment.
I know when I’m at home, I have launch the ESPN GameCast — a Flash-representation of each pitch with accompanying stats — and I almost never read what my local newspaper has to say about the team. When I want to watch the game, I go to MLB.tv, not my local news outlets.
Now, I do listen to the radio (Marty and Joe were my surrogate uncles on radio growing up), but that is more a local phenomenon.
If, as I think is true, breaking news is the number one traffic driver at local newspapers, it only makes sense that they look at how to translate that to the sports page.
