photo by allthingsd
Last week, ESPN launched their new SportCenter app into the already crowded sports app market.
The purpose of the app is to provide fans with the biggest scores, highlights, and news from around the sports world. This app will be an update to the ESPN score center app which is the most popular sports app of all time with more then 43,000,000 downloads.
Some of the key features of the app according to espnmediazone include: enhanced scores, enhanced news, and ESPN now. Other features include Favorites and Clubhouses and Inbox.
The scores screen allows fans to set alerts and access expanded information about games with a simple tap.
The news which is created by ESPN displays the best and latest headlines with a mix of features, breaking news, video, and highlight clips. A cool aspect of this according to techcrunch is how the stories flow into each other. What this means is when getting to the end of a story the headline of the next story appears directly below it.
What ESPN Now does is it integrates scores and updates about team(s) that are personalized by the user. It also allows fans to reply, favorite, retweet, share, and email tweets from ESPN twitter accounts.
The favorites screen provides access to favorite teams and upcoming or current games. Tapping on a team brings you to the new clubhouse feature. What this does is, provide a team specific theme that mimics the Sports Centers app main navigation, with Scores, News and ESPN Now tabs for each team.
The inbox feature gives fans the chance to catch up on relevant alerts, scores, video highlights, and news based on their preferences and activity.
Not all fans love the update with its additional features. Matt Stein, 23, from West Babylon told me, "I used to use it more but since the update it sucks." Stein continued, "It used to be just about scores and standings and stuff, now there is so much other stuff and it doesn't load as fast."
The score center app was the most popular sports app of all time for a reason. ESPN thought they were making it better with all the additional features and stuff but maybe they should reconsider the many changes.