In the first quarter of every year, the most anticipated sporting events take place, be it the NCAA’s College Football Playoff Championship, Super Bowl, NHL All-Star Game, NBA All-Star Game, et al.
In the same first quarter, these enterprises share an underlying aspect that spurs business growth: analytics.
The major players in this segment have been positioning themselves over the last few years, but it’s within this past week, though, that aggressive moves have materialized that will continue to alter the landscape going forward.
STATS’ recent acquisitions of The Sports Network and Automated Insights add assets to their portfolio that complement its framework. The integration of these properties will take time to roll out, but should strengthen its overall market share. The latter transaction, in particular, shows an eye towards addressing a void among their product set.
Likewise, SportsData, a competitor in the space, has spearheaded its own dealings of late.
Since being acquired by Switzerland-based Sportradar, a worldwide supplier leader of sports and betting-related live data, in 2013, SportsData has amassed north of 300 licensed customers, which include the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Turner Sports. Under Sportradar, they have primarily focused on their 65 partnerships with non-domestic sports leagues and federations. The acquisition enables SportsData to forge a greater presence abroad through new resources and, more importantly, secure partnerships across the American purview.
SportsData’s latest partnership with NASCAR marks the first U.S.-based governing body for Sportradar.
While SportsData is a market leader in delivering real-time sports analytics, such a partnership only boosts its standing as a technology and product provider. Tom Masterman, SportsData’s Vice President of Business Development, mentions to SportTechie that this opportunity aligns with their reputation of distributing data to the broadest possible marketplace. This endeavor is even more appealing considering that NASCAR has solely made available their statistics within its own digital properties in the past.
Up to this point, NASCAR has delivered real-time experiences to fans via a host of multimedia products, including NASCAR.com, its official website, RaceView, a subscriber-based broadcast platform, RaceBuddy, a second-screen tool, and a litany of fantasy games. They have been successful on their own in converting the extensive data points of a race to digestible, fun, and engaging material for user consumption. And all of these mediums demonstrate its dedication to the hard core race fan.
Now, with SportsData, though, NASCAR is permitting an external company to package and sell its statistics to third-party operations. NBC Sports and Yahoo would be two potential buyers for this data, especially since they both already offer NASCAR-related content in their respective outlets. Although the deal’s composition is rather conventional by SportsData’s standards–receiving the licensing rights, like the statistical margin of a driver’s lead and the order, from the league and then integrating it to other platforms after it’s sold to them–this is NASCAR’s first time in allowing distribution of its stats elsewhere.
Larger sports entities have to face decisions of keeping everything they produce housed internally and to what extent should they be agnostic about it. NASCAR, initially, has remained insular insofar as developing and building out their digital properties, which gives them a personal understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses. Control, overall, allows them to maximize revenue and be stingy with their work, diligently assessing with whom they should partner.
“The NASCAR team needs to continually focus on a broad array of important technical concerns,” says Masterman.
“They already have an established multimedia presence. What they sought from a relationship with SportsData is a focused partner; our expertise to modern technology for delivering data to every type of business-to-business client,” Masterman added.
Appropriately, NASCAR recognizes the need for SportsData’s unique API and their proven ability in data aggregation to help with the production of premier products. SportsData, in turn, has the privilege to leverage its technology to capture and package raw, atomic race data from a nationally esteemed brand in NASCAR and their tradition.
“For the first time, developers looking to build NASCAR-related products have a data source. The result will be a host of new digital products to engage a broader sports data fanbase,” states Masterman, intently at the crux of this partnership’s value proposition.
This multi-year pact comes, conveniently, preceding NASCAR’s preeminent event, the Daytona 500. The more companies that have access to league’s official data, naturally, additional consumer products will be created through time. The relationship does mean collaboration across technology, product development, and marketing and sales functions. Just by including NASCAR’s data to its API is a win for SportsData. Both parties should scale as a byproduct of this viable agreement, where SportsData gains exposure of its service and enter a new territory whereas NASCAR nets a larger user base to tap into along with new products to compel fans back to its sport.
SportsData drives NASCAR towards the age of analytics, creating an inclusive extension that fans will benefit from engaging in ways never fathomable before.