The NFL Players Association (NFLPA) has acquired a minority stake in a live streaming blockchain platform, enabling players to deliver interactive content for fans to engage with.
Through its OneTeam Collective, the Association’s athlete-driven accelerator, the NFLPA will use SportsCastr’s FanChain platform to provide live commentary across a wide range of professional and collegiate sports, as well as sharing personal insights.
SportsCastr is a platform that enables anyone to show live streams and deliver commentary in real-time. To that end, they are now giving NFL fans a new way of engaging with games and the sports players.
Speaking to CoinJournal, Kevin April, SportsCastr CEO, says that before this fans had to use “generic social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram to find content from their favourite athletes.”
“It’s a very fragmented landscape,” he adds. “SportsCastr aggregates player content together in one place, within a platform that’s designed from the ground-up for sports fans.”
With the use of the FanChain token, users will be able to earn tokens for participating on the platform. These tokens can then be used to unlock premium NFL player content, purchase sports tickets or merchandise. They can also send virtual gifts to NFL players. Athletes, in turn, will be able to earn revenue by creating content for the platform.
In addition to providing a creative way for athletes to connect with their fans, April believes it could boost adoption among non-crypto users when fans see their favourite players talking about cryptocurrency.
“Because there’s nothing more global or mainstream than sports, there is an opportunity to introduce cryptocurrency to a massive audience that crosses every border and speaks every language,” April adds. “This is why the convergence of sports and cryptocurrency is important – because it has the power to change things and move the status quo forward.”
Unlike Facebook Live, which has a latency delay of around 10 seconds, SportsCastr has sub-second latency, meaning that fans are watching a live stream from players in real-time, April explains. The platform is changing the way fans interact by delivering one-to-one connections with top-tier athletes that can be hard to find online. There may be online publications and blogs written by athletes available, but in April’s opinion they don’t provide “authentic reactions.”
“At the end of the day, SportsCastr removes the barriers between the athlete and the fan,” he says. “Isn’t that every sports fan’s dream?”
The first NFL players are expected to begin using the platform in the third quarter of 2018.
https://coinjournal.net/nflpa-to-provide-unique-content-to-fans-through-live-streaming-blockchain-platform/
