Fanatic App Tells Out of Town Fans Where to Go

tN_133400_Fanatic social logo

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.

CBS Sports App Finally Supports Video, Tablets

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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.

ESPN FC on TV Launched Last Night with International Focus

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For soccer fans there is a new show called ESPN FC that caters to your needs on ESPN covering a wide array of international leagues and teams including Spain’s La Liga, Major League Soccer, Barclays Premier League and a number of such as the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team.

The programming looks to be an interesting mix of both what is expected such as breaking news, studio analysis and commentary on issues in the sport. However it will also integrated digital content from ESPN’s ESPN Stats & Information Group’s data visualization analysis, as well as incorporating social media. A digital version of ESPN FC on TV will be available on ESPNFC.com.

The show will vary both in broadcast time and focus depending if it is a weekday or a weekend. The Sunday version will run at 12 midnight ET and will be a one hour program that will in part be a weekly wrap as well as analysis of what the events shown will mean looking forward.

Weekdays the show will air as a 30 minute program at 5:30 pm ET on ESPN2 and most days will have a regular featured segment or two such as Americans Abroad on the Monday show or the EPL Weekend Previews that will be shown every Friday.

Every show will have between five to nine analysts/reports covering diverse topics and stories. There will also be a “ESPN FC TV” blog that will contain additional content and extended interviews. There will also be an extra TV segment posted on line daily at ESPN that will focus on viewers’ questions and comments from the show. The company plans to use Twitter extensively, primarily for fan polling.

It is interesting that this comes just a week prior to Fox launching Fox Sports 1 which is expected to also have a solid soccer presence. However ESPN has been steadily enhancing its soccer coverage over the last few years and I suspect that this is just the next logical step for the broadcaster.

YouTube and Gillette Team up for Soccer Channel

Gillette Football Club

YouTube continues to become an alternate source of sports programming for fans and its latest effort is in partnership with Gillette to create the Gillette Football Club, a channel that will focus exclusively on soccer and its fans.

The sports channel will deliver on demand high definition video to soccer fans and is designed to enable fans to register to follow their favorite teams and provides goal and highlights for the teams as well as other league highlights including stats from a player, team or league.

It allows you to follow the English Premier League, Ligue 1, Serie A (both Brazil and Italy), Eredivise, SPL, MLS, La Liga, Ligat Ha’Al, Ekstraklasa and Bundesliga players and teams and will also show select highlights from international matches.

However it provides much more including videos of interviews with top players and team personnel as well as other features including football shows. Several high profile teams are creating content for the channel including one called Copa90 Allstars where skills and ball handling tricks will be demonstrated by top footballers.

While the programming is free, all you need to do is register, the site will be filled with advertisements from Gillette, but that really seems a small price to pay.

YouTube has been increasingly pushing into sports as an alternative to broadcast sports and had a wide variety of the 2012 Summer Olympics events available in much of the world as part of its partnership with NBC and has invested approximately $200 million in marketing its growing number of channels.

It will be interesting to see what, if any, impact this has on broadcasters such as Fox Sports and ESPN, both of whom have been increasingly focusing on the growing interest in the US as well as trying to leverage the already great demand for the sport worldwide. It seems to me that the Gillette Football Club, with VOD, is a much better avenue for fans to get updates than to rush to their TV when a network has a scheduled program that does essentially the same thing.

Will we see an ESPN or Fox team with YouTube in the future or will they seek to launch their own rival highlights program online. Whatever happens it seems to me that fans will benefit from increased competition and the resulting growth in exposure the sport receives.

Augmented Sports App Helps Celebrate Start of French Soccer Season

GoldRun and Front Row Marketing Services have teamed with The Ligue de Football Professionnel to create an app that enables fans to create uploadable images of themselves and the Trophee Des Champions that is awarded to the winner of an annual grudge match.

The Trophee Des Champions is the award given to the winner of the annual match between the Ligue 1 champion and the winner of the Copue de France. In one format or another it has been played since 1949 and in its current mode since 1995. The match marks the beginning of the French soccer season.

While it might seem a bit odd that the match opening the season would be played on a foreign shore, the purpose is to help promote French soccer and it has been played in Montreal and Tunis, Tunisia in the past.

The app is not just so that fans can download images of the trophy and then share with their fans, it is a contest in which the winners will get a VIP paid trip to see the match between the two champions at the Red Bull Arena in Harrison, N.J. on July 28, 2012.

The contest is pretty simply to play as long as you participate in social media. A user downloads the GoldRun app that is available for both Android and Apple’s iPhone, and then they need to open the app and then sign in using either Twitter or Facebook.

From there the process is pretty simple, select the Trophée des Champions “photobooth” from
either the featured carousel or campaigns list and then follow the instructions. Once you create your image then share via Facebook, Twitter or email. Sharing enables you to actually enter the contest.

GoldRun is a mobile app that enables the superimposing of a computer generated image with one from a smartphone camera. The app has been used in a variety of contests designed to promote brands including Ice Age: Continental Drift and New York Giants Virtual Super Bowl Ring.

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