Thursday, Sept. 19, 2019 — A roundup of some of the key sports technology news you need to know, including SportTechie’s own content and stories from around the web.
- Golf stars Tiger Woods, Rory MclIroy, Jason Day and Hideki Matsuyama will play head-to-head in The Challenge: Japan Skins competition presented by GolfTV. The skins competition will tee off Oct. 21 at Golf Narashino Country Club in Chiba, Japan. The exhibition challenge will stream on Discovery’s GolfTV subscription service in both Japanese and English while U.S.-based fans can also watch live on the Golf Channel. GolfTV and the PGA Tour plan to host more international challenges under the same format in the future. Each hole during the skins challenge will be assigned monetary values that increase as the competition plays out. GolfTV launched last year as part of a 12-year, $2 billion global media rights deal between Discovery and the PGA Tour.
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- ESPN has extended its broadcast agreement with the Special Olympics for the next eight years. The network will now be the global broadcast partner for Special Olympics signature events through 2027, including the World Games, Winter World Games, and USA Games, which will be held next in 2022 in Orlando. In addition to the programming deal, ESPN will continue to serve as the global presenting sponsor of the Special Olympics Unified Sports initiative. “ESPN and Special Olympics have made real progress in spotlighting these incredible athletes and their achievements,” said Russell Wolff, EVP and GM of ESPN+, in a press release.
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- High school esports company PlayVS announced a $50 million Series C funding round led by New Enterprise Associates. PlayVS is a software used by high school administrators to organize esports leagues for students by integrating directly with the video games to track wins and losses, player stats, and match schedules. The L.A. Dodgers previously led a $30 million Series B investment in the company last year. PlayVS now has plans to expand beyond high school sports. “Initially, we were all about: How do we build out the best infrastructure for high school esports? We’re now thinking about how to build a 100 million-plus user subscription service around esports,” PlayVS CEO Delane Parnell told Forbes.
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- Fox Sports is collaborating with Pandora to introduce a first-to-market audio ad campaign this football season. The Dynamic Audio campaign will see individual Pandora listeners receive customized ads alerting them of college football games and NFL Thursday night games being broadcast on Fox Sports. Pandora will personalize ads for users based on the time zone they are in, their favorite teams, and through 3-D audio, which is an immersive soundscape that transports audiences to an active experience according to Pandora.
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- Accelerator foundation Hype Sports and the NYUSPS Preston Robert Tisch Institute of Global Sport held a demo-day on Sept. 18 at NYU so sports-blockchain startups could make pitches to investors. The 14-week accelerator bootcamp began in June, and 10 ten startups were invited to participate in the final event. At the demo-day, Hype awarded its top prize to Lympo, a blockchain-backed fitness app that rewards users with money and products for working out, while NYU gave its Best Pitch Award to Betherium, an esports betting platform.
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