http://www.forbes.com/sites/darrenheitner/... Sitting home alone watching the San Diego Chargers take on the Kansas City Chiefs is not the most exciting way to spend a Thursday night. Twitter serves as a medium to vent frustration with the game, but the message may reach individuals who have no attachment to the match-up, and the stream of updates flowing through a person’s timeline may speak little of the score and more about the latest celebrity scandal.
A United Kingdom-based company called fanatix has created a free iOS “social TV app” exclusively for sports fans, providing them a personalized stream of sports content – news updates, tweets, video clips, live scores and stats – and enabling easy sharing of that content to personalized groups, known within the app as “huddles,” which consist of group chats for sports fans. No longer does one have to swim through a Twitter stream to find relevant tweets or worry that his message will be lost among a plethora of others unrelated to the live game being watched.
The company just announced its United States launch, which means that it has not yet captured a vast American audience. However, since launching overseas in October 2011, fanatix has received more than 250,000 downloads and has a daily active user base of over 35,000. The average fanatix user is now accessing the app five-and-a-half times a day, with the average registered user accessing the service over ten times per day. And there are already signs that Americans will be interested in the app. 10% of the app’s current audience is from the U.S., which makes it the second largest market after the U.K.
Another strong sign for fanatix is that it recently received $1 million in angel funding, giving the company a total of $2 million in raised capital within the span of a year.
“Our original thinking was that you find yourself watching sports alone, and that’s ridiculous,” said fanatix founder and CEO Will Muirhead to Forbes.com. “There wasn’t anything providing me with an easy way of connecting with other fans watching the game and relevant material that complimented the activity. We thought long and hard about what category to focus on, and sports was the obvious one – it was the only live TV and it’s the only global live transmission.”
The current user base, including those located in the U.S., tends to be heavily dominated by soccer fans. ”We started in soccer and got most of our traction from soccer fans,” explained Muirhead. ”But we are starting to expand into larger and more interesting sports in the U.S.”
The service has already created partnerships with Manchester City, ESPN, Eurosport and a range of other sports media entities to help them engage second screen sports audiences, especially during live broadcasts. Muirhead said that there will be many more U.S.-based partnership announcements in the near future.
When asked why fanatix should be one more social app downloaded and used by smartphone and tablet owners, Muirhead responded, “Trying to stay on top of news relevant to your team is a tricky process. We make it easy and make it social. It is all about easy discovery of content and easy sharing of content.” Muirhead hopes that he has created the cure to watching sports matches alone.
Posted By: Vishant Patel
Sunday, November 4th 2012 at 5:32PM
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