Crowd-sourced content and social media has had a dramatic impact on information consumption.  Stories break on Twitter.  Quotes from athletes and entertainers can often be tracked back to social networks.  This all leads to both faster media delivery and faster media consumption.  The downside to this is that it can lead to less fact checking and there are various things that are not best consumed on currently available social networks.  SLAs, committed uptimes and approved processes are still pretty “cool” at times.

Generally, most products seem to have a separation of church and state when it comes to content.  They are either old world, “serious” products with licensed content, or, they frame themselves as a cutting edge, “new media” product.  Amazing nuggets of info are out there, but they’re often hard to find for normal humans.  It is hard to combine traditional and new media in interesting ways while ensuring the core information remains simple and intuitive to access.  It can be a clash of employee cultures at times.  The concept of actually paying for content can be offensive to some new world “thinkers”.

So, at OneLouder we set out to create a content curation platform that would allow the combination of traditional licensed content with a constant influx of real-time/curated/socially-driven/crowd-sourced content.  As we created this capability, it became obvious that sports as an area of interest was a great entry into the marketplace.  While many things have benefited from (or fallen victim to?) time shifting through devices such as the DVR, sports continues to be a real-time activity when enjoyed at its best.  Combining real-time scores and stats with real-time Tweets that have been properly curated has the potential to deliver a stunningly compelling experience.  But, items such as Tweets need to be curated and presented in ways that didn’t previously exist.  These then need to be combined with scores and traditional feeds in real time.  Do this…and you have a really cool new sports entertainment experience.

Today we launch SportCaster.  It is an example of the OneLouder vision.  While the technical challenges and infrastructure were interesting, we think this app meets the goal I set for delivering an amazing sports app.  The people involved have taken what I drew out on a whiteboard and really brought it to life.  Thank you team for all of your hard work!

We hope you enjoy this new app and the many updates that are on the way.  It is the first step toward delivering the very best content in a new, useful way, rather than being tied to some notion of traditional vs. new media.  Enjoy…..that remains the most important thing.