Gaining Popularity:
Rising popularity of sports plus live-and-easy access to users are the two major reasons for the innovators to come up with an idea and create a new market of Fantasy Sports Industry. Fantasy Sports Service market research reports exhibit industry analysis, analyzes current and future industry trends and measures market size. The Fantasy Sports Service industry has shown a dramatic expansion due to the growth of number of broadband and mobile connections, increase in sports participation/viewership and rising advertising expenditure. This is expected to grow aggressively in coming years.
Expansion of new types of Fantasy Sports Leagues is another reason for the growth of this industry. The single largest player in the year 2015 is Yahoo Inc. which is estimated to control 18.0% of total revenue. Yahoo has remained the largest industry player over last many years as it is the main source of Fantasy Sports services which has also attracted many loyal fans as users like to stick with the same provider.
Fantasy Sports Data Hub and Third Party Data Providers:
There are many fantasy sports data providers which offer real-time sports content across multiple sports. They are serving fantasy data to many online fantasy sports vendors, media and mobile clients worldwide. They collect and distribute the fastest and most accurate data which are available in easy formats. Fantasy Data providers are offering comprehensive content to fantasy startups and enterprises therefore catering to the needs of companies and industries across the globe.
Such data is available for Fantasy football like National Football League, Fantasy basketball like National Basketball Association, Fantasy baseball like Major League Baseball, Fantasy auto racing, Fantasy golf, Fantasy hockey and most importantly Fantasy soccer leagues in Europe. The fantasy sports data gets easily integrated with the mobile and web applications therefore allowing developers to get the intuitive, self-explanatory sports data feeds available. The http://fantasydata.com/ offers open API and detailed documentation which allows clients to do majority of integration.
Some major third party data providers are Bundesliga Live Scores API, La Liga Live Scores API and Premier League Live Scores. NFL Arrest API provides users access to a database which comprises of arrest records for NFL Players of over 15 years. Using this API, developers can query the desired data. Similarly, the Stats FC Dugout REST API allows developers to access and integrate the functionality of Stats FC Dugout with other applications. Sportradar US which was formerly known as SportsData is a subsidiary of Switzerland-based Sportradar AG. It is a leading sports data and digital content provider which provides comprehensive data for all major sports and hundreds of leagues around the world. This company covers NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, NASCAR, PGA, FIFA and more.
These third party data providers offer advanced real-time stats and charts, a live play-by-play stream, live updates via web or mobile, and more. You can even choose data according to your requirement like live vs 5 min delay vs post game data. Data vendors also offers data in in multiple formats like CSV, JSON, etc.
Challenges FOR Fantasy Sports App Developers:
1- Learning Games: While techie bots are very proficient in their own technical domain, they actually face learning of game nuances as a great challenge. Understanding the Fantasy Sport requires lot of mental aptitude and development and testing arena seems battlefield to them. They successfully assimilate all the gaming strategy and it seems that they are through the ordeal. A deep understanding of the game is required for Fantasy Sports App Development as the fantasy sports gaming development is very different from online multiplayer game development. Knowing strategies and scenarios in Fantasy Sports Gaming development is altogether different and clumsy compared to the actual sport. To implement the scenarios, hits, head kills, strategy takes a lot of toil and hard work during the development and of course during testing.
2- Data Integration and Filtration: Fantasy Sports App development deals with huge data and hence data integration and suitable filtering consumes lot of time. Effort is required inconsistent data integration and error-free data filtration. There is huge data related to number of players, their scores, their physical attributes etc. which requires homogeneous data unification and keen filtration.
Above are few challenges discussed which Fantasy Sports App Developers faces but with a team of proficient developers and testers enterprises can easily overcome these obstacles.
Wrapper:
Fantasy Sports is addictive, challenging, social and most of all a fun idea. The development of the same might be as much challenging but very much in demand. Technology has fueled fantasy sports industry which has grown over 60% in the past 4 years. New gaming concept and instant gratification continues to grow and technology advancement will put the right game in your pocket. Technology innovation and passion for sports can only impact the Fantasy Sports industry positively.
References: Fantasy sport wiki,IBISWorld Report, ProgrammableWeb News
Rachit Agarwal
