Does badminton have any mobile app where you could track each tournament's score live? I'm thinking an app where you would get push notification whenever the score gets updated. So when you're on the move you could still monitor the game's progress.
Generally - https://www.tournamentsoftware.com/home More specific to the BWF circuit - https://bwf.tournamentsoftware.com/home However, I wouldn't rely on it being realtime depending on which tournament/match/league. You seem to be at the mercy of individuals posting scores and it can take hours for updates to appear, even then it could just be the final scores for the day. I think All England results are updated quite regularly but previous years the scores do not always refresh, as if the push notifications are temperamental. Obviously not an app but that would have to be very specific or every tournament would need to use the same single solution. At least the website tries to be mobile friendly, as long as your mobile is the size of a desktop.
I use "flashresultats" it is in French but has a ton of live scores for badminton on all kind of sports. I do not know about notification but score are updated live and are often updated before the YouTube stream ! (By several seconds)
Thanks for the replies guys! I know about tournamentsoftware, but I could not find any mobile app for them. They got that neat LiveScore but that doesn't seem to push notifications straight to your phone either, you'd have to constantly keep monitoring it. I'm just thinking it would be nice to get constant push notification (like you know those sticked notifications) that updates every time the score updates. And you could follow any player, say I want to follow Momota, it would always start reporting Momota's score everytime Momota played in any competition. I'm a software developer nowadays. I'm thinking that if there is a need for something like this I might as well just write a mobile app like this myself. Could do comments/chat or some other simple features for it too if it would be helpful for our badminton community. I couldn't find any public real-time source for results, so I think in the end it would have to be crowdsourced, ie. community members watching the game live and then updating the score continuously (through the app). Those general apps for many sports may not work well because there is no "badminton community" in the app whereas this would be purely for our badminton community. What do you guys think, would it be useful for you or just waste of my time & effort to build one?
The best idea would be to use the existing data feed from tournamentsoftware, they are the bwf approved system so could be doing much better. Well, a quick look at the livescore page source suggests they use SignalR v2.3 and have a single hub called scoreboardHub so should be more than capable of pushing updates as they happen. It is not difficult to setup multiple hubs for players or matches given the hard work capturing the scores has already been done. We will find out more tomorrow when the All England starts then see if there is realtime score data flowing to clients or not.
Thanks for helping with checking about tournamentsoftware! I agree that their real-time score data would be ideal but I could not find any publicly exposed API they provide. Are you saying that it could be feasible to just tap into that scoreboardHub service/API by having a SignalR client tap into it as if it was just another user (not a bot client)? That might work indeed! But if they ever change the client/API implementation it would instantly break the service itself using it. I doubt tournamentsoftware would be happy to provide that data freely for any 3rd party service since they want to be doing that themselves through LiveScore. What do you think about the usefulness of this kind of app to begin with? Would I just be wasting my time trying to put this together...
I doubt it too and wouldn't condone it without permission. However, I would play with it in isolation for fun though. It is possible they don't have the expertise to make a mobile app but if you do and can prove it has a market there could be value in it. The last question is the most important but you decide if want to make something or have fun making nothing. Online betting benefits from live updates for football matches which means they can provide in-game betting for clever ways to separate money from wallets quicker. Why wait for the final result when you can see what is happening live and bet on next scorer, who wins next game, who is leading at the interval.
This kind of leads to more questions. Is betting on badminton big business? If so, where are the biggest markets? Do they already have a live score system in place? What proportion of fans want live feeds vs gamblers?
Honestly, I was just thinking if it would be useful for the community. Didn't really think of building this into an actual business, I got my more serious startup concept I'm working on and that gives me plenty of headache with trying hard to make it seem like a business instead of an online service. The live score itself as a real business/startup would probably not suffice, it would need more than that. But a well designed live score feature by itself might make a mobile app for tracking that worth using for some people. I'm just thinking that since for developers there is this community app - social media if you will - called devrant and it's very popular. I could imagine badminton and other sports eventually doing something similar, like a mobile social app for the community. Localized, like you'd be seeing stuff from the people near you or in your country, plus the people you follow (like top players). So some single useful vertical (a single useful feature like live score push notifs) as the foundation could work in getting the first users and start building a real community there.
Necessity is the mother of invention and money is the facilitator. As evidenced by the flashscore link, the incentive is gambling which I was alluding to in earlier posts. It is entirely possible to produce something using "for the love of it" rather than "make money from it" but in the end it usually comes down to money in some form even if it starts out free. A community entering scores might work but is not reliable or sustainable and would leave fans disappointed. Ultimately it is reinventing the wheel as somebody (BWF, TournamentSoftware, Flashscore, whoever) is already capturing live scores but are not presenting in a way that makes it easy to consume via a phone app intended for fans. However, as a fan I would love a one-stop-shop application that not only gives me scores but also information about players, links to their social media, stats, schedules, pictures, videos. Of course, access to that kind of data comes at a cost and who pays? Opta (https://www.optasports.com/ + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opta_Sports) have managed to carve a large share of the market for live scores and other sports data - which they sell. Badminton is not one of their sports unfortunately. They provide widgets for use on websites - look at the motorsport widgets as an example of what can be achieved. Great if you follow Formula 1 which has to be the most isolating and backwards sport in terms of ordinary fan engagement.
Probably. I don't think they'll be happy to give that info for free anyhow. I think you're right when describing the financial dynamics and if something like this got popular I wouldn't expect it to be non-profit of any kind. Typically, these things start as concepts without revenue logic and I'd be fine building things up that way. I'm just trying to gauge the demand (ie. is this actually a problem people would like solved) before actually putting work into something like this. Opta seems like a good example of how to do it right. I also agree with you that a more or less full featured app but context specific (like all about badminton but only badminton) would be the best. I don't care about Formulas when I check out badminton stuff. So something like this would be really nice to have for our community. Starting from solving one single problem well would be a nice start for that. Anyway, judging from how few people reply to this post I take it this is really not a problem necessary to be solved for our community. Good to know that I should not be wasting development hours on it. Thanks for those that did reply!
Hi guys! As a final work on Android courses, I created an application with the described functionality. The first version is currently available on Google Play. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hurray.ermolaenkoalex.badmintonlive I will be glad to your ideas, comments and feedback.
New version of the application available on Google Play Store. Upcoming tournaments: - Badminton Asia Championships 2019 - XXIII Pan Am individual Championships 2019 - BARFOOT & THOMPSON New Zealand Open 2019
New version 1.0.3 of the application available on Google Play Store. - Badminton World Tour Super 100, 300, 500, 750, 1000 and other major tournaments (Sudirman Cup, World Championships, BWF World Tour Finals 2019, etc) - results, live score and draws - Other tournaments from BWF calendar (Future Series, International Challenge, International Series, Junior International Series, etc.) - results and draws - Calendar and BWF ranking - Badminton news
But we can perhaps ask the managers to update the score so that all players can follow in real time. What do you think.