Guest Review:  Tom Kelk is a tech/sport blogger and Account Exec at global social media agency We Are Social.  You can find him on Twitter @TomKelk, LinkedIn and his blog.

The watching of sport has developed rapidly over the last few years. It is now the norm to ‘dual-screen’ when watching a game. Whether that be on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube, viewers like to engage to a greater extent with a broadcast in the modern day. Whilst all the aforementioned social channels do this job, there is no market-dominating app that congregates all the conversation one a single game into one ‘second-screen’ experience. This is exactly what SportStream intends to achieve.

They already service NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB; their next target is football – specifically the Premier League and MLS. This is not a surprising next step as the football community is already well-represented, and is continuing to grow in social media. There was a 126% increase in the Premier League’s Facebook and Twitter following in the year 2011-2012 and this trend has continued in 2013. SportStream intend to capitalise on this extended conversation and also apply it to the growing MLS following.

SportStream is effectively Twitter, Facebook messaging and Sky Sports statistics – all rolled into one. The app allows a user to flick between games and engage solely in the chat from that particular game. Whilst this is a nice feature, and may work well in NFL and NBA, chat is aided by the breaks in play and that is my concern with relation to football. Will people want to be that engaged in a deep conversation about the game during play? I’m not so sure.

To counter this concern, SportStream have tried to curate an experience for the user based on who they follow on Twitter and Facebook. This also applies to the game you’re following, gives you notifications over which game is hotting-up and also recommends influencers for you. A “sophisticated semantic engine automatically identifies and tracks influential Twitter personalities, bloggers, sports journalists, teams, players, Facebook friends and fans” which should add an extra dimension to your second screen experience.

Another area SportStream are heavily pushing is their in-app, in-depth visual statistics. They offer:

• “Graphic timeline of plays: Each match is summarized by a graphic timeline of key plays, including goals, player substitutions and cards, all marked by intuitive icons. Fans can follow each turn of events and see who made the play and when.
• Visual stats: Graphic display of the numbers for each team’s shots on target, touches, saves, passes, possession percentage, etc.
• Headline stats on a constant bite-size loop: The names of players who scored and the minute mark at which they made the play will scroll continuously under the team’s logo so fans can have the most vital stats at their fingertips.”

Whilst in-game statistics are probably an essential for this type of application, I have a concern with this focus as a USP. Do the bulk of football followers want in-depth stats? They are interesting, but the feature works far better for American sports where statistics play a far more important role in the discussion of a game. In my opinion the statistical detail is one of the least transferrable USPs for SportStream and should be included more as an added extra.

There are a couple of nice additional features include an in-app tweet composer which automatically adds the hashtags relevant to that game:

Also, the allowing of a private conversation to develop in a separate area is an interesting extra. This feature could be adopted well by users, especially as it’s designed as quite central to the app and how it functioned. I can definitely see myself becoming embroiled in a debate and this offers a great outlet.

The problem for SportStream is that I can see users log-in once or twice a week when their team is playing and that being all. Will users become addicted to using the app under that usage? Possibly not. Will users fully immerse themselves in each and every game or would they like to follow and comment on the game on Twitter whilst also considering other topics? The latter seems more likely.

The challenge for SportStream is to give users enough reason to switch from their current Twitter clients. Most users have settled into how to discuss a game on Twitter and may be unwilling to switch this routine but it should be given a chance. It is a very interesting app, has a lovely UI and gives us a different sport-viewing experience. It’s a free app (only on web and iOS at the moment) and I would certainly recommend giving it a try, see what you think.

Want to learn a bit more? Check out their slick HTML5 site: http://sportstream.com/