How big is the overlap between the tech geeks salivating over their iPad deliveries and the sports geeks who can tell you Kobe Bryant’s scoring average from the three-point line eight seasons ago?¹ NBA Digital is about to find out.
The joint venture between Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting division and the National Basketball Association has put out an iPad app using real-time data feeds to provide live scores, team and player details and reams of constantly-updated statistics, writes media editor Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson.
NBA Digital already sells more than 100 iPhone apps, priced from $4 for fans of a single team to $40 for a league-wide season pass, but Brian Perez, general manager of NBA Digital, sees the iPad as changing mobile users’ behaviour.
“It’s much less a device of convenience than a device of engagement,” he says.
“Unlike a mobile phone, where convenience is a major factor, we think this is going to be used more as a companion in the home,” he said, predicting that many users would spend as much as two hours at a time with NBA Game Time Courtside.
“If you’re used to using an iPhone the metaphor is completely different. It’s so much richer, so much more engaging and so much more vivid. Once you go back to your mobile device you kind of want to go back to this form factor.”
The app uses the larger screen size well: icons move on and off the court as players are substituted, graphics show where individual players are making and missing their shots, a full-screen ‘ladder’ tracks teams’ routes to the finals and a ticker along the bottom features the latest NBA videos, news and tweets.
It also offers a lot of video (using Turner’s own encoding platform rather than the unsupported Flash or Apple-sanctioned HTML5), including highlights of previous games in the series. “It’s like having all the information our TV analysts have,” Mr Perez says.
NBA Digital is offering the iPad app free for the current season, but says it will sign one or more sponsors for the play-offs. From the autumn it will charge an as yet undisclosed amount.
Ads will feature in time, too. Mr Perez says: “I think it can be a very rich platform for advertising but you cannot walk into this new device category and apply the same constructs.”
( ¹Kobe Bryant’s 3-point average in the 01-02 season was .250)
