What Vine’s New Push Notifications Could Mean for Sports

The social media app Vine is sort of hard to nail down. Yes, it’s a tool that lets users share short videos with their friends and the world, but it doesn’t have one particular purpose. People use it to make comedy clips, post super short music videos, commit acts of journalism, and any other kind of thing that can fit in a six-second short. Vine is a great tool to blast out a video to all your Facebook and Twitter cohorts. But with our list of friends and followed accounts growing all the time, it becomes easier and easier to miss great content. Vine is hoping to counteract that by offering users the ability to receive mobile notifications from their favorite Viners. With a single touch, people can now get notified whenever an account posts a new video.

This could be seen as useful for lots of people, but I think sports fans could really benefit if leagues and teams do it right on their end. Almost every major league sports franchise has a Vine account. How much they use it varies quite a bit. But Vine could be used by these teams (and their respective leagues) to push out a good deal of highlights to fans. Certain league-specific apps can do this already, but Vine could be used as a one-stop highlight spot spanning across multiple leagues and teams.

It’s true that some teams use Vine to do this already. But the addition of push notifications taps into the immediacy of sports. Of course people can gather around a computer at the office on Monday and re-watch (and re-watch and re-watch) Odell Beckham Jr.’s one-handed snag, but a big football fan would want the ability to see it on their phone while they’re at the airport, on the bus, or even hanging at home without the game on TV.

Vine’s new push abilities compliment sports highlights as a whole. There could certainly be some TV licensing rules to deal with, but teams and leagues should see this new feature as a great potential to reach fans. We want our highlights and we want them now. Vine is making it easier for that to happen. Now it’s on the content creators.

(Image via Jason Howie)





David G. Temple is the Managing Editor of TechGraphs and a contributor to FanGraphs, NotGraphs and The Hardball Times. He hosts the award-eligible podcast Stealing Home. Dayn Perry once called him a "Bible Made of Lasers." Follow him on Twitter @davidgtemple.

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John
9 years ago

If I may make a minor critique.

The tone of this post is more than partial and verging on enthusiastic. It reads much like a press release was gleaned for information, rewritten as a post, and then made “conversational” for blog dissemination. There isn’t even a suggestion of a lack of utility of Vine, or drawbacks or redundancies of this new feature. Or any kind of criticism, to be direct. The end lines challenge “content creators” to seize this awesome tool, after this whopper of a line “We want our highlights and we want them now.”

FanGraphs is a place of baseball analysis. TechGraphs to me lacks that analysis and has become something of an amplifier for industry press. The bedrock of FanGraphs is topical, independent, reasoned and supported opinions. I cannot think of a TechGraphs’ post which compares.