This post is all about the Sports page and its future. Let's start with what's new!
New Leagues
Sports launched in Boost Blue with support limited to MLB. Adding new sports to the app is fairly easy, but building out the feeds for each league's teams is very time consuming, so I wanted to start with a single league to kick off the prototype.
Over the last month I've been working on these new feeds, and Sports is ready to expand. V2 introduces support for:
NFL
NCAA Football
Premier League
La Liga
Bundesliga
UEFA Champions League
NCAA took the most time, as it has about as many teams in the Power Four conferences as the other additions do combined. At the moment, NCAA Football support only includes those conferences and any teams in the Top 25 ranking. There are two obvious missing inclusions here: the NBA and NHL. Those will be next :)
New Features
This update also reworks the UI entirely and expands on the vision for a dedicated sports app.
Home Page
v1 was a single page showing MLB games, with each game opening to show the scoreline and posts about that game. Each league still has that experience on its own page, but the starting point for Sports is now a unified home page that shows all of your favorited teams and the top posts and news links about those teams from across the network.
Standings
League pages still start with a view of upcoming games, but also include a toggle to view the standings for that league.
Highlights
I saved the best for last. Highlights are videos from across the network posted during a game, shown in chronological order, and deduplicated so repeat highlights aren't shown. Boost shows these in a story-style UI on both the Sports home page (for your favorites) and each team page. The app remembers which highlights you've watched, so you can pop in and out of the game right where you left off.
This feature is limited to MLB and the NFL, simply due to which teams I've been able to verify have enough content to be a good experience. I'll continue working through and adding additional teams, so don't give up if your team of choice isn't yet supported!
Highlights is the only content in Sports not served by a Graze feed. The filtering and sorting process starts with a basic filter, but also requires custom logic that Graze doesn't (and probably shouldn't) support, like checking the quality of a video and fingerprinting the audio to remove duplicates. However, I'm planning to eventually publish these as custom feeds, so that they can be used by anybody on the network. Stay tuned!
The Sportsky App
This project was never intended to stay a part of Boost Blue. I added it to Boost so I could get moving quickly, but this is going to become a Sportsky dedicated app, which I have started work on.
That app will launch with its own PDS and sign up flow, and I'm hoping it will be a major driver of new users in the Atmosphere. It won't be called Sportsky, both because I don't think I should take over a community term, and because there's a rather litigious sports broadcasting company with Sky in its name. The working name is Sideline.
If that's interesting to you, please follow the new app on Bluesky. Engagement with that project goes a long way toward getting it off the ground.
Finally, check out Sports in Boost Blue!