Here at MSR we have praised Bleacher Report’s Team Stream app for doing a great job of aggregating content we care about, namely that about the teams we like. What we like a lot about Team Stream is its embrace of content from all sources, not just Bleacher Report, to give as full a range of news and opinions as possible.
Now from the other side of the coin we have the Worldwide Leader, which today introduced a beta version of something it is calling SportsCenter Feed, which does exactly what you think it might do — brings all of ESPN’s breadth of content into one Twitter-like stream, with a kind of cool big viewing window to the side.
Though nobody doubts ESPN’s ability to give you more sports content than you could actually consume, the question we have is whether or not sports fans really want to stay inside the ESPN bubble, or whether they might prefer creating their own “feed” on say, something like Twitter itself, which as we said earlier is already the default AP wire for all of sports. For many fans ESPN might be more than enough, while others might prefer to have opinions and takes that originate somewhere other than Bristol.
Where you might see SportsCenter Feed getting some love is outside ESPN itself, as (we think) the strategy is to license the APIs so that other content aggregators or sites — like say, a team or league’s home page — could license the ESPN content which it could then show in some kind of a streaming window. Some mobile sports apps like PlayUp are already experimenting with similar sports news feeds, so that users of those apps don’t need to log on to another app or site to get scores and other info.
What is clear is that ESPN is making good on its pledge to do things digitally first, even if that means sabotaging some of its current cash cows (if you sift through SportsCenter Feed, for instance, you may not need to turn on your TV to sit through the commercials on the regular SportsCenter broadcasts). So even as Twitter and other new options look for a sporting edge, the Worldwide Leader is going to be the Yankees in this arena as well. Not that the Yankees can’t lose, but you will need a good game plan to beat their killer lineup.
