1
Looking to score with a mobile soccer app
Matt Hartley, Financial Post Published: Monday, May 31, 2010
Courtesy of Score Media
With the World Cup of soccer kicking off June 11, Toronto’s Score Media is launching a new soccer-specific smartphone application for BlackBerrys and iPhones.
TORONTO — John Levy’s son Noah wanted to know why his father’s Toronto-based media company was running television commercials during college football games in the United States. The chief executive and founder of Score Media Inc., owner of the Canadian sports network The Score, had no idea what his son was talking about.
As it turns out, the TV spot actually had nothing to do with Mr. Levy’s TV channel. Rather, it was an ad for Cellular South Inc. The U.S. telecom carrier was using Score Media’s smartphone application – ScoreMobile – to market a new BlackBerry device to sports-hungry Americans, even though Noah, a 21-year-old University of Texas student, might have been the only person watching that game who knew that Score Media owned a TV network.
"They had contacted BlackBerry [RIM] because it was such a sports-crazy area, and asked what would be a good application they could use to promote as part of their ad," Mr. Levy said.
Now, with the World Cup of soccer kicking off in South Africa on June 11, Score Media is launching a new soccer-specific smartphone application for BlackBerrys and iPhones – ScoreMobile FC – as part of a plan to expand its burgeoning international footprint to hundreds of millions of fans of the Beautiful Game around the world, primarily via mobile applications.
More important, Mr. Levy predicts that within two to four years, the revenue generated by Score Media’s online and mobile advertising efforts will eclipse the company’s existing television ad sales.
"From a corporate perspective, the more people we can communicate with and the bigger the network we can encompass, the more people are interacting with us and the more people we have to sell stuff to," Mr. Levy said. "I’m thoroughly convinced over the next number of years that we’re going to be generating more revenue from mobile and Web than we are from the TV network."
In addition to introducing the Score brand to new audiences around the world, Mr. Levy is banking that ScoreMobile FC will be able to generate new revenue from advertisers.
Many of those advertisers were previously inaccessible to Canadian sports networks, including gambling websites that advertise prominently through English soccer leagues but whose advertising is restricted in Canada.
"It’s almost like the shackles have been released from us," he said. "We now have the capability to compete effectively in international markets."
Already, ScoreMobile, the company’s current multi-sport mobile app that provides users with live scores and news from a variety of professional leagues, boasts more than 1.3 million active users, and the company’s director of mobile, Dale Fallon, believes ScoreMobile FC will likely double that figure by the end of 2010.
ScoreMobile FC will feature live scores and news headlines from about 30 soccer leagues and competitions from Europe and around the world when it launches on BlackBerry devices and Apple Inc.’s iPhone later this week.
Mr. Fallon, said ScoreMobile FC will grow to cover more than 50 international soccer leagues by the fall and that the company also plans to roll out versions of the app in French, Portugese, Spanish and German before the end of the year.
A version of the app designed to run on Google Inc.’s Android software will launch sometime after the World Cup begins, around the same time the company plans to roll out its first iPad application.
Still, Mr. Fallon said the company has no current plans to launch other single sport apps.
"We see soccer as a special case," he said. "It takes ScoreMobile beyond its North American roots and helps it be relevant in a meaningful way for sports fans around the world."
One of the challenges associated with launching a soccer application of such depth is that getting reliable sources of real time information for second and third tier soccer leagues is much more difficult than securing access to real time NHL or NFL information, Mr. Fallon said.
"It’s pretty easy for us to get our hands on that data and for the data to be of a high quality – timely and reliable, but when you move to the next tier and the next next tier, you’re getting into the Russian league and the Greek soccer league, it’s just not as easy to get a quality data feed," Mr. Fallon said.
mhartley@nationalpost.com
