Since its formative years, fantasy football is predicated on statistics. These numbers have formed fan interest to develop rapidly, both from the hardcore faction and casual ones alike. These fictional games serve as a conduit for friendly competition and community–well before any of the mainstream social networks.
In fact, daily fantasy football, in particular, reached unique audience growth of 485 percent via computers and 847 percent on mobile last year, per Nielsen.
Despite the pronounced user base (over 41 million worldwide, with fantasy football the dominant segment), fantasy football providers haven’t necessarily delivered everything fathomable, especially when it comes to mobile and given its user acquisition.
Technologically, these fantasy football apps are getting saturated. And it’s noticeable that they’re not moving data to the end-user quickly or efficiently, which, ultimately, causes back logs, slow performance, and failures.
The demand for the sport, conversely, certainly makes fantasy football apps unique over other kind of sports apps. It’s not a real open market, there is only one NFL–a monopoly, in its own right, with a tangibly captive audience.
Moreover, the real-time data aspect helps keep users engaged. Fans are no longer passive viewers. According to the NFL, 70 percent of fans use a second-screen while watching football. Of course, it’s not difficult to comprehend as to why, as mobile devices and corresponding apps give fans easy access to player stats and analysis that could make or break their fantasy football games. Whether it is making scoring or injury predictions, or choosing from odds that change as the game happens, the level of engagement and ongoing potential for each user is at an all-time high.
Having worked with numerous developers to solve fantasy sports-related issues as an intelligent internet messaging company, Push Technology’s Code Whisperer, Jarrett Bariel, mentions to SportTechie that NFL Fantasy, the league’s very own property, stands above other providers in this space. By using their network, the user gets the information straight from the source. They have become one of the largest providers; and he believes they’re excelling over their competitors (Yahoo, CBS, and ESPN). At the same time, though, these other key players are approaching their respective business strategies differently.
That said, the aforementioned daily fantasy football market and its emergence offers a new avenue for expansion. DraftKings and FanDuel lead the way, albeit in a controversial time that awaits developments in regulation.
“These two markets share a very symbiotic relationship, with a level of mutualism that has not been fully matured,” says Bariel.
Because fantasy football is tightly controlled–this is part of the problem–there has not been a lot of disruption. However, with large funding rounds for startups like DraftKings and FanDuel, it is proving it’s not solely sports fans here, but that there is opportunity for viable business–in some format that better suits all parties involved.
From an infrastructure standpoint, technologically lacking certain facets permeates fantasy football apps. With these apps gaining more traction and users than ever before, they are generating more data on both ends. Bariel believes developers need to build a platform that can scale and reduce bandwidth, diminish latency, and move data in a bidirectional fashion at a faster speed.
“With many of the infrastructure challenges out of the hands of developers, they need focus on what they can control as a way to ensure app data requests can be completed, no matter the device, operating system, number of concurrent connections, or bandwidth,” Bariel states.
“By using advanced internet messaging to reduce the amount of data that is sent and only transmit the relevant data, app developers can improve app performance–no matter the surrounding conditions,” continued Bariel.
Developers, thus, would–although not always the case–be more prudent to focus on the data-side first. During the production of a mobile app, developers ask themselves what to with the surplus amounts of data. By understanding what data is necessary for their users, a better product can be produced. Then, subsequently, it’s a matter of figuring out a way to display all the relevant data intelligently, which provides the best user experience.
The following question can be deduced: “what data can you move to devices without killing the bandwidth?”
Currently, though, between data overload, poor connectivity, and real-time needs, they all stand among the fantasy football mobile sphere’s set of problems.
Bariel points to real-time needs as the biggest issue for app developers. These fantasy football apps all use a group of statistics that are dependent on actual real-time information. For fantasy football players, it can become painstakingly difficult to make real-time decisions without real-time information. If these users can’t receive all of the stats in real-time, they can’t make smart choices for their fantasy teams.
Yet, without proper connectivity and a way to manage big data, delivering real-time intel remains problematic. Bariel mentions that by streamlining the data distribution process and sending the parts of a data set that have updated, rather than the entire data package, advanced internet messaging techniques allow apps to communicate the data in real-time, at scale and great speed.
For example, one of Push Technology’s customers, Betfair, is among the world’s largest international online betting providers. As one of their main differentiators, they offer in-play betting, so users can make a bet while a game is going on.
To make this process effective, however, Betfair needs to send and receive data in real-time–no matter how users are logged on. So, to do this, they elected to implement Push Technology’s internet messaging tech, because it offers them a transport mechanism that doesn’t impose limits or structure on the data transported across it.
Accordingly, internet messaging techniques, like Push Technology’s Reappt and Diffusion solutions, are increasingly critical for gaming apps since they ensure data can be delivered in real-time at scale, on whatever level of connectivity is available, providing a high performance and positive user experience.
Of course, new iOS and other software updates would impact fantasy sports app usage the same way that they would impact any other type of app, too. When there’s an update on a user’s smartphone, chances are some of the apps will stop working. Sometimes the apps are only partially affected, but sometimes they can fail completely.
“The developers have to be constantly modifying and updating their apps to support these new software updates because they are at the mercy of the App Store,” states Bariel.
“You have to be sure to get your updates to the user as soon as possible, or risk your users deleting your app for a competitor’s. But, if you reduce the amount of specialized programming that is required for each app, and make it very straightforward, there is a much less likely chance that they will fail as updates progress,” Bariel added.
Since fantasy sports apps are date-fused, the more developers can use data to lead the experience and display, the more likely they are to survive updates unaffected. With sending more data, they have to make sure it’s done insofar as being efficiently and effectively.
“In this space, where the apps are purely data driven, technologically they are at a disadvantage. There is so much data to send; and, right now, they don’t know how to be smart about sending it. The more statistics the apps generate, the harder it is to determine how they’re being used, and what is relevant,” Bariel believes.
If providers’ developers can eliminate redundancies or stale information to streamline data sets and sensibly package relevant updates together, then fantasy football apps can improve their overall performance.
These mobile nightmares should pose scary problems to face for fantasy football providers–especially as interest for playing exponentially grows.