Ask HN: How Can the Sports Industry be Disrupted? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How Can the Sports Industry be Disrupted?

8 pointsaashaykumar9210 comments

I'm a sports fanatic, plain and simple. I love to watch and play almost any sport. Favorite is soccer (I've played my entire life) by far, followed respectively by football, hockey, basketball, tennis and baseball. But with any of them, I just can't find a 'problem' with it. Maybe I'm trying too hard to look. But the only things that seem to do well is verification technology (GoalCam in hockey, Zoom-in technology for refs, etc.). Isn't there something else that can be done?

One idea was to allow for people to upgrade their tickets in-game. So let's say I'm sitting in the nosebleed section (really high up) but I really want to move closer to the action...I would open x app on my phone and see what open seats are closer. Once I find one that I like, I can pay for it right on the app (I take a cut of sales) and head down to those seats. But then I quickly realized it would be pricey and I don't think it's something that many people want.

There's gotta be more...

If you have any ideas you'd be open to discussing, ping me: aashayk @ Googles Email Service

At least in baseball, a lot of teams--believe or not--are not run like businesses where the main goal is to earn a profit. Instead, they are run organizations where the main goal is to win. The argument is that winning leads to more business as a fact of the universe. It's bizarre.

I mean, look at that whole MoneyBall thing: instead of trying to focus on understanding why people come to games, the Oakland A' focused on optimizing performance for less, not necessarily more profit for less. So, instead of being disruptive on the business model side, it's disruptive on the game-itself-side. This kind of sentiment is shockingly pervasive.

On the other hand, look at the Giants. The Giants--and you no doubt know about this--do this dynamic pricing where they charge ticket prices based on weather, who's playing, etc, in order to optimize the amount of people coming to games. The focus is business-side. Interestingly, maybe keeping a full stadium is why the Giants win so much.

Shoot, what if you did that but with Machine Learning for all aspects of what the teams sell…tickets to souvenirs to hotdogs. And what if you made it so teams could email fans (or through some push on an app) saying, 'hey, free tickets today!'. And then what if you brought that to smaller organizations like the minor leagues and then to the NCAA. How many NCAA teams are there, like 10000?

In baseball, currently, the TV contract dominates income, which means your income is more or less directly tied to how recently you signed your TV contract. Medium market teams with very recent TV contracts are wealthier than the Atlanta Braves, which has the worst TV contract of all the big-market teams.

The upwards trend of TV contracts clearly isn't sustainable, but trying to extract the maximum value from your attendees just seems less interesting at the present.

Gamecam - simple on-and-go device to stick to the poll or wall and have it wirelessly broadcasting game over the internet (possibly via nearby tethered laptop connection). Not talking about NFL or NHL games, but more about kids and parents sports. Tons of parents cannot attend their kids games and feel guilty about it. Buying "remote" access to game like that would be well appreciated.

I'd like the ability to pay per view. I don't have a lot of TV channels but like watching sports, why can't I pay for the NBA or NHL finals on a pay per view basis? It is probably something to do with licensing, but if that could be cracked I would be a customer.

We are trying to disrupt the non pro basketball space at StatTrackr (www.stattrackr.com). Most companies focus on the Pros or top college program. There are tons of basketball stat keeping apps (including our own) and we are providing centralized place for players to share their stats and an API for developers to access the data.

http://www.stattrackr.com

http://developer.stattrackr.com

Seems very susceptible to cheating...as in player X, who sucks, can record superb (but fake) stats on this app. Correct? Or is there something to block this?

I would say ~90% of the stat recorders for our iOS app are coaches who use the tools to scout players or help review strengths and weaknesses of their players, so we are not as worried about incorrect stats. Anybody can record stats for any player, but the owner of the player profile must approve the stat line before it becomes public, so that prevents others from purposefully harming another players stats. Ultimately, the correctness of the stat line falls upon the player (or owner of the player profile), so they put their integrity on the line when updating or accepting their stat lines.

Maybe an investment system, where an individual may invest on a team or player and get some ROI.

Sounds like what Pogoseat are doing. Yield management of sports tickets is a fairly big thing and there's quite a few startups in the pre-game space for it.

Make something better than Soylent and sell internationally. Would buy it.

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