To all the avid “Snapchatters” out there, in case you were wondering how the people on Snapchat’s Super Bowl 50 story had the live score filtered onto their selfies, they weren’t just getting special treatment.
Get The Latest Sports Tech News In Your Inbox!
Snapchat has recently added a brand new feature in the form of a geofilter that gives a person the ability to display live scores when they take a photo or video in the vicinity of a selected sporting event.
Snapchat will look to integrate the new feature into NFL, NBA and MLB matches from this point on, and has been doing so for a little over a month. The geofilters have been installed at every NBA arena and were also at SB50, and will look to expand into the NFL and MLB for next season.
The rollout of the sports filters has seemingly been a successful one, as TechCrunch reports that in the past week, the “Live Score geofilters saw 20 million views from 51 games.”
The idea is set to revolutionize live scores on the personal smartphone, diving deep into the competitive market that consists of Twitter and apps that are built specifically to deliver updates and live scores like Bleacher Report’s Team Stream and ESPN.
The edge that Snapchat has in this field of proven contenders is that no other app or platform can show live visuals with the updates, whereas Snapchat can. The way the process works is that anyone attending a game can upload as many photos or videos as they like, and Snapchat condenses these into one feed. Unlike other social media platforms, the app gives the user the ability to pick and choose when they want to view one of their friend’s feeds. This feature will address the dreaded ‘spoilers’ that are all over Facebook and Twitter.
The idea has no noticeable flaws at this stage, which is worrying for other social media platforms and live update apps. The fact that an app can reel in 20 million views of anything in one week is astounding, and the feature is only young. While sports are the focus for now, one would have to imagine the impact Snapchat could have in the commercial world if these sports filters could start attracting sponsors.