Evri, the realtime content discovery engine, acquired Radar Networks early last year, incorporating the startup’s semantic indexing technology into its products. The move laid the groundwork for Evri’s shift into the mobile space, as it has since used its realtime semantic matching algorithms to begin delivering news in targeted categories and the Twine team to expand into mobile. Last year, the startup launched EvriThing Tech to allow readers to create and add their own channels on any tech topics, as well as those from predefined topics. (Similar to what FLUD, and others are doing in the mobile content space.)
Today, Evri is expanding its mobile functionality, launching a suite of sports applications for iOS and Android devices, called SportStream, that will be powered by its eponymous platform. With the NFL season looming, Evri is kicking off its suite of sports apps with SportStream Football, an app that looks to provide readers with realtime push notifications and in-game commentary through social channels — to make your Sunday viewing experience more interactive and a little more Web 2.0.
With SportStream Football, Evri is looking to provide an immersive experience for fans that allows them access to realtime news content from thousands of sources, integrating personalized and up-to-date information from fans’ social feeds, enabling readers to live tweet highlights from games as they happen. Viewers can see in-game score updates and play-by-play summaries, with personalization options for specific teams, like key injury and trade news, for example.
Just as Taptu has created a fantasy football stream for iPad users, Evri is looking to have its targeted and personalized content stream become a great resource not only for fans but for fantasy football players as well.
The objective here, says Evri CEO Will Hunsinger, is not to “out-ESPN ESPN”, but to take advantage of where ESPN’s realtime sports coverage lacks. Not only by scouring the web for information from bloggers and other sports content outside of ESPN’s realm, but by allowing fans of, say, Georgetown sports, to create targeted news feeds for their alma mater’s teams. While ESPN is obviously a robust content source (really, the death star of sports content), there’s plenty of room here for startups to improve on the sports content reading and viewing experience.
With Evri’s well-honed semantic indexing data, the SportStream apps are a great resource for personalized sports info. Evri is smart to go after these enthusiastic, underserved niches. Or, even if sports content isn’t exactly sparse, to give sports fans an easier and less “noisy” reading experience, with realtime functionality, adds weight to the startup’s value proposition. Yes, Pulse recently struck a deal with ESPN, and Taptu is offering a great tablet app, but there’s plenty of room in the market, and Evri’s approach to fan engagement via the social graph and realtime tweeting, is a good start.
We’ll be looking forward to the startup’s next moves.