A Samsung Galaxy phone on display at The Samsung Experience at the 2016 PGA Championship. (Photo by Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for Samsung)
TheScore, a resource for real-time sports scores, news and stats, is partnering with South Korea-based Samsung Electronics to offer personalized live scores and breaking news through the Bixby Home assistant on Galaxy devices.
The deal covers World Cup soccer, and will include future NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, and English Premier League games. Fans can select their favorite teams and leagues to tailor their experience.
(Courtesy of CNW Group/theScore, Inc.)
The service can be accessed by swiping right on the home screen to trigger Bixby, Samsung’s equivalent to Google Now and Amazon Alexa. Fans who want to dive deeper into the news beyond the scores or headlines can tap theScore’s content card, which will take them directly to theScore app or webpage.
The deal gives Samsung users easy access to personalized live scores, while offering theScore a large platform to display its database at a time when live scores are being increasingly commoditized across social media and apps. In a similar vein last month, Snapchat announced a partnership with the crowd-sourcing score app (and theScore competitor) ScoreStream to more deeply integrate scoring data into Snapchat features, such as stickers, filters, and links into other apps. ScoreStream also feeds real-time scores into Facebook Messenger.
“This enables us to showcase the features that have made theScore one of the most popular sports apps in North America to a huge audience,” said theScore CEO John Levy, in a statement.
In addition to sports scores, Samsung’s Bixby provides news, weather, fitness and other information. Like similar services made by Apple, Google, and Amazon, Bixby can understand and respond in natural language.
SportTechie Takeaway
This deal is a win for both Samsung (through its artificially-intelligent assistant) and theScore (as one competitor in a crowded space of media platforms providing live sports scores, news and data). It also comes ahead of Samsung’s planned launch of a smart speaker that would rival Amazon’s Echo. Amazon has been working with third-party partners to add sports features to its Alexa-powered speaker.
Companies (including those outside the personal assistant space) are working to stake their place in the sports data market at a time when fans are increasingly demanding access to live sports through non-traditional channels, such as video streaming and social media. Doubling down on this market is also important now more than ever with looser regulations in the U.S. governing sports betting.
