Creating A Social Gaming Layer Over Live Sports

With March Madness set to tip-off this Thursday, tech startups will attempt to capitalize on the growing trend towards people expecting their technology to deliver a customized experience. By personalizing fans’ viewing experiences with gaming elements and alerts based on an infinite number of loyalties, these companies may not only be changing the way we watch sports on TV, but also our reason for doing so.

The startup Thuuz is a computer program intended to tell fans when to start watching March tournament basketball games:

“It analyzes live feeds of play-by-play statistics, measuring factors like the pace of the game, the closeness of the score and other factors. It then rates games on a 100-point scale, and allows users to sign up to receive alerts whenever their personal threshold for excitement is reached.”

Pre Play Sports is a small technology startup based in New York City. The company designed an app for smart-phones that awards points to users for predicting the outcomes of plays, and even the coin toss. Through a gaming type experience, fans can inject their emotions into each play and quantify, and qualify that relationship in comparison to other fans. As said by creator Adam Daines, “the actual game becomes secondary.”

Joshua Brustein of The New York Times explains his thesis:

Sports leagues, television networks and technology companies are adapting to these changing habits, finding novel ways to take apart games — showing only the most exciting bits or helping viewers focus on a single player or statistic which, while it may be important to their fantasy team, could be incidental to the outcome of the game on the court. These alternative forms of viewing may be changing the way we watch sports, or even why we watch.

Thuuz

Pre Play Sports

New York Times: “A Better Way to Watch Sports”