Ask HN: How to legally obtain sports data for commercial use?

It's a lot more than 4 figures. Getting just the basic data will be in the 5s, and that's per season of 1 sport. Maybe I suck at research but after talking to the reps about pricing, 4 figures would be an absolute steal.

Most sites have a player ID. If you map the player ID the aliases won't matter. Just keep that name data on your end and it will be consistent.

Getting accurate real-time data is not a hard problem. The real problem is coming up with the money to do it the legal way.

Hmmm, seems to me there's a business opportunity in providing lower cost, more developer friendly sports data. I remember looking into getting access to sports data since I wanted to do some analytics after I read Moneyball. Old, archived data is easy to come by, but any fresh, real-time data sources seem to have non-trivial costs.

I guess there might be some restrictions on who gets access to the official raw data for various games, depending on the sports league. If the costs for getting that data are high, then the only way to circumvent that would be to collect them yourself. Even then, I don't know if the leagues would come at you hard for gathering data and using team names or player names...

As for the stats, you purchase them from a stats provider. The big dog is Stats.com, but they're very expensive. They are the primary source for all of the major fantasy sites, though some use secondary sources (I think for accuracy verification).

At Draftmix we used a competitor of theirs called PA Sports Ticker, which Stats bought shortly after we shut Draftmix down. We had previously used a cheaper one called XML Team, but we realized quickly that we had gotten what we had paid for as the feeds were often updated very late or contained errors. They're fine enough for getting started (and probably the easiest to implement, since you pull the data on demand rather than having them post it to you) especially if you don't require live stats. Live stats cost more and are harder to implement. You could get post-game stats and schedule data for a few grand a year back then from XML Team, live stats for a few times that, but I don't know what Stats buying their primary competitor has done to prices. I can't imagine it's made them get cheaper.

There's a new one called Sports Direct. I don't have any experience with them, but our former salesman from PA works there. I'd be happy to put you in contact if you'd like, just email me. He's a good salesman at least.

For player images and team logos you need to set up licenses. Logos come from the league (NFL, MLB), player images from the players' unions (NFLPA, MLBPA). This is very costly. The actual images themselves can be provided by Stats and other sources, but you can't use them without paying the license (though Stats may have worked out a deal that lets them include that in the package).

The Fantasy Sports Trade Association (fsta.org) is the best place to find service providers for the industry. Anyone worth anything is a member.