Sunday Sermon: Bleacher Report’s Team Stream Shows Us How to Share Content

I have seen the immediate future of sports content sharing, and if it’s not the ultimate winner than Bleacher Report’s Team Stream feature will be something others will quickly copy. The main reason why I think it will be so successful? The best part of Team Stream is B/R’s willingness to embrace content that isn’t solely its own, to better serve the fans. That sharing attitude is going to make Team Stream a go-to feature that may eventually be more popular than any single site’s collection of reporters and columnists.

If you haven’t seen Team Stream yet, just go to the B/R site and set up a “stream” for yourself. It works either online, in an email newsletter, and most importantly, on mobile devices. The basic premise is, B/R’s team of web-watching editors sifts through everything that is out there and sends you a bundle of content centered around the teams or sports you are most interested in. The key is that unlike other media outlets, some of whom won’t link or mention competitors, B/R provides links to anyone and everyone, from major content creators to bloggers and tweeters. That’s the secret sauce that will make Team Stream taste great.

My blogging mentor, Om Malik, had one big rule for creating content — don’t waste the reader’s time. Team Stream embodies that ideal perfectly. Instead of me having to maintain links to multiple web sites, follow multiple people on Twitter, I can just “stream” the best stuff for my teams and save myself a lot of hunting time. And after visiting the B/R offices last week to see their energetic, massive bench of editors engaged in finding the best content out there I’m pretty confident that they’re going to serve up enough good stuff every day on my teams and topics to keep me from needing to go everywhere else.

So far I’ve been following the Chicago Bulls and Golf Team Streams as a test, and I can say right off the bat the golf one is a champ. Today’s newsletter, for example, gives me links to stories from Bleacher Report itself, but also from Yahoo Sports, from PGA.com, from Golf.com and from the AP — a much better mix than any traditional newspaper or sports site, which primarily include content only from their own staffs or partner “wire services” like AP. And I haven’t yet tried the new iPad version of Team Stream but I can only guess that the bigger screen size will make activities like watching video replays just that much easier.

Keep your eye on Team Stream, and see how many folks try to copy what Bleacher Report is doing. The power of sharing and smart editing is a winning combination.