FOX Sports scores big points with new mobile app

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In sports, every second matters. Sports fans want high-fidelity, anytime-anywhere access to the latest scores and stats for their favorite teams, and FOX Sports delivers. With an end-to-end Microsoft solution, including Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin, Xamarin Test Cloud, HockeyApp, and SQL Server, FOX Sports developers created a five-star app that lets sports fans fully personalize their user experience and immediately parse millions of data points to access instant sporting event updates. Users are cheering and—with the right technology in its corner—FOX Sports is ready for the future of sports.

Meeting fans where they are

Sports fans are a special breed of person. Think of the face paint, the team jerseys, the chants. Some say sports fans are expressing their tribal affiliation when they root for their team. And even when they can’t watch the event in person, many are still loyal fans, tuning in to watch from afar. Global sporting events can attract viewers in the hundreds of millions.

Over the past decade, FOX Sports, the umbrella entity representing 21^st Century Fox’s wide array of multiplatform, US-based sports assets, has become synonymous with sports broadcasting, offering more than 3,000 live events a year, including the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, NASCAR, UFC, FIFA World Cup, college football, and more.

And, while television is still a critical format for delivering these broadcasts, mobile and web-based experiences are increasingly crucial for fans around the world. Studies show that, even if they watch one sporting event on TV, sports fans are checking in on other sporting events on what many call their “second screen”—the mobile device in their pocket.

To meet these fans on those devices and make sure they’re always up-to-date with their favorite teams, players, and leagues, FOX Sports needed an app with a personalized, rock-solid user experience that worked seamlessly across any platform. “FOX Sports has always been about fans first,” says Tom Zentmeyer, Vice President of Technology and Games at FOX Sports. “It’s tribal. People care about the teams they follow—and people are increasingly mobile. With the FOX Sports app, we wanted to put everything a sports fan cares about in their pocket and give them the bold, immersed, and immediate experience they have when they watch an event on FOX Sports.”

The right technology for an all-star app

For a mobile app that reports up-to-the-minute sporting updates, the key to a high-quality user experience is quick access to the most relevant data, customized for that individual’s search. The development team at FOX Sports was charged with building an easy-to-use app that could pull in thousands of feeds every day from more than two dozen data stores, process that data, and deliver it as quickly as possible to fans. They also needed to create an efficient user interface that would allow fans to personalize the app and to easily navigate to the specific teams and sports they love the most.

To stay ahead of the competition, FOX Sports knew it needed to deliver fully native apps—and rapidly incorporate new features to keep users engaged. “There’s a lot of competition in the sports app market,” says James Ellis, Manager of Engineering for Mobile Apps at FOX Sports. “We wanted to build a very polished product and a great user experience with animations, custom fonts, and custom design.”

To increase its customer base and enhance engagement, FOX Sports developers chose Microsoft products and services. The solution included Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin to write a cross-platform application, Xamarin Test Cloud for automated UI testing and troubleshooting, and HockeyApp for crash reporting analytics. The end result? A fully native user experience that pulls millions of data points from its Microsoft SQL Server databases and instantly delivers the latest stats to users’ hands.

With Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin, developers could use their existing code and skills in C# to create the high-performance, native user interface that its loyal fans demanded. “We chose Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin to develop the FOX Sports app because we would be able to develop a cross-platform solution using a language our team was already familiar with,” says Zentmeyer. “By sticking with C#, we could become mobile developers at a much quicker rate than if we used one of the platform-specific languages explicitly. And Xamarin let us develop across all the platforms our customers use.”

The ability to share code across platforms and to use existing .NET expertise helped the team move quickly. “The thing I appreciate most about Xamarin is being able to have a shared code base for the data layer and the app services,” says Ellis. “We can build multiple clients on top of that shared foundation and that has saved us a ton of time. We were able to develop the entire app in less than eight months—which was quite a feat.”

Delivering five-star mobile quality

As a consumer app, user experience is critical, and Xamarin Test Cloud helped the FOX Sports team test and validate that features worked as expected before they shipped to production users. FOX Sports developers continue to run automatic test scripts on the Xamarin Test Cloud real-device library to ensure new updates and releases are issue-free. “Xamarin Test Cloud is an important tool for us because it allows us to test the app on hundreds of different Android devices,” says Zentmeyer. “We can build test scripts in C#, upload those, and run different tests on a nightly basis to ensure that no bugs are slipping out the door. We are able to test every different aspect of the app on almost any type of device you can imagine.”

Engaging with such an avid sports fan base means the FOX Sports app must stand up to high expectations and tough user scrutiny. With HockeyApp, the development team can monitor how the app behaves in the wild with real users, identify issues, dig into root causes, and prioritize fixes. Because of its end-to-end Microsoft technology stack, FOX Sports developers can capture user feedback and quickly implement fixes and new features. “With Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin, our team went from nothing to having a functional, cross-platform app very, very quickly,” says Zentmeyer. “And now that it’s in place, we use HockeyApp to see where issues are and react to those quickly. We can add new features and get them up in Xamarin Test Cloud to see what they look like across devices, see where issues were, and react to those quickly. The development process is fun.”

Staying ahead of the game

The volume of data the FOX Sports app processes and the volume of users the company reaches could make for quite the scalability challenge, especially because demand ebbs and flows from relatively quiet weekday afternoons to periods of heavy usage on weekends.

To address its need for scalability, FOX Sports powers its app with SQL Server, which houses the data that comes in from hundreds of feeds from dozens of providers. “SQL Server is at the core of everything the app is built to do. It allowed us to build a relational database schema that marries data points from all these different providers into a nice, tightly integrated system,” says Zentmeyer. “We use SQL Server tools to optimize the indexes so that users get the data in the app as fast as possible.”

The number of data changes during a sporting event can be tremendous. In the average NFL game, for instance, there might be 400 to 500 data changes. To reduce network usage to an individual user and still deliver the data that person expects, SQL Server sends snapshots as the game progresses. Caching layers in the data system replicate data regionally so people in different parts of the world can access data relevant to them as fast as possible.

“We get updates every 10 seconds with the latest data,” says Ellis. “So it’s a massive system built on Microsoft technology that powers efficient live-updating. On a big sporting event day—NFL Sundays, for instance—we might have tens of thousands of people watching each game on the app. The FOX Sports app has been in the wild for six months now. And the uptime on SQL Server has been nearly 100 percent. Because of the stability of SQL Server, our users have never experienced a delay. For us, that’s critical.”

The rave reviews

Today, the FOX Sports app offers real-time scoreboards across all its sports broadcasting. From there, a user can dig into the specifics of a game—the top performers, a play-by-play recap, and game highlights. The app also features highlights from top shows. “With Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin, we were able to deliver a native app experience, styling the app so it is easy and fun to use—exactly to our graphic design department’s specifications,” says Ellis. “We can provide rich push notifications with team logos, which differentiates us from our competitors.”

Because the app was built with Microsoft technologies, FOX Sports can quickly expand to new platforms, add trending technology, and continuously delight its users. “The app and the data behind it are very reliable thanks to the systems we’ve put in place to monitor the events going on around the world,” says Ellis. “We can immediately address almost any issue and update data in real time. And we can send out automated alerts to our support team to fix an issue before a fan knows anything is wrong. A lot of times the scores will come into our app even before a fan will see it on TV.”

Since its release, the new FOX Sports mobile app has a fast-growing user base—a number that is increasing exponentially, the company says. To date, the app has received 11,000 five-star reviews. “In developing the FOX Sports app, we wanted to make sure we found tools and technologies that would help us solve problems now and in the future,” says Zentmeyer. “The sports world is always evolving, and the Microsoft technology stack will help us evolve with it.”