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Way back in the dinosaur age of technology, there used to be a device known as SportsPhone which fans called for a small fee to get the latest, up-to-the-minute scores of their favorite teams. First, sports radio and then the Internet came along in the 1990’s and crushed it just like asteroids destroyed the dinosaurs of the Stone Age.
The latest phone craze is applications, or “apps”, for mobile phones, downloads that can provide all the statistics and information for the Fantasy Football frenzy that is sweeping the nation. When football catapulted over baseball as America’s pastime, fantasy football, or the ability to create and manage your own player rosters for the purposes of gambling, made rotisserie baseball obsolete. Fantasy football is now estimated to be an $800 million industry and growing and 55 percent of fantasy players say they watch more NFL games because of their participation.
According to Simon Buckingham, CEO of online applications store Appitalism.com, about 80 percent of fantasy users play fantasy football because of the “managibility” of just having to change their rosters once a week. Because of too many games and too many numbers, this process became too overwhelming for the average baseball fan.
The most popular football apps are NFL Pro Tweets, NFL Draft Blogs, National Football Post, which has information from pro football insiders, and Sportacular. The NFL, which makes little money directly from the apps, neither sanctions nor prohibits their use and does not have its own application but it is definitely benefiting from the craze.
“The phone is such a personal device as it’s with you all the time and it gives you the ability to update your rosters in real time,” said Buckingham. “People use it for five minutes here, five minutes there. But they use it for killing time rather than saving time,” he added.
The advantage of going to Appitalism, according to Buckingham, is that “all of the apps are in one place. It’s like one-stop shopping.” There are also 400,000 free apps. The New York-based company began in September, 2010. Apple and Amazon are where most people download apps but Buckingham says the market is just beginning to boom. “Mobile rights will be worth billions five years from now,” he said.
Buckingham thinks the recent settlement of the prolonged lockout has made the fans’ anticipation of the 2011 season, which begins on Sept. 8, even greater than usual with the flurry of free agent and trade activity. The heightened interest will only help the mobile app industry prosper more.
