31–37 of 37 posts
I'm actually glad someone brought this up. I'm starting a company around this very idea: making data available and consumable. Our first site is up: http://www.cfbreference.com There's about 5 years of data that we've culled from the NCAA about CFB. We're adding more every week and will soon go back in time for historical data. But, our twist is that the site will be upgraded to be a completely consumable site. Full…
Regarding scraping: I have a hard time figuring out what the difference is between having a human read a web page with sports scores on it, and then entering those scores in to your application vs. having a scraper grab those scores automatically. In most cases, these source web pages will be publicly available without requiring any agreement to a terms of service contract. Scraping a site and using the actual HTML i…
I'm actually glad someone brought this up. I'm starting a company around this very idea: making data available and consumable. Our first site is up: http://www.cfbreference.com There's about 5 years of data that we've culled from the NCAA about CFB. We're adding more every week and will soon go back in time for historical data. But, our twist is that the site will be upgraded to be a completely consumable site. Full…
I'm actually glad someone brought this up. I'm starting a company around this very idea: making data available and consumable. Our first site is up: http://www.cfbreference.com There's about 5 years of data that we've culled from the NCAA about CFB. We're adding more every week and will soon go back in time for historical data. But, our twist is that the site will be upgraded to be a completely consumable site. Full…
It definitely seems that there must be an opportunity here to compete against STATS and others. But if (like you) you wanted to compete where do you legally get the stats in the first place or in an ongoing manner. What is the original source of the data? Do you have to pay for game tapes, watch them and compile the stats yourself?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It definitely seems that there must be an opportunity here to compete against STATS and others. But if (like you) you wanted to compete where do you legally get the stats in the first place or in an ongoing manner. What is the original source of the data? Do you have to pay for game tapes, watch them and compile the stats yourself?
I'm also curious as to how you get the data. The fact that there seems to be almost a monopoly by STATS on the data leads me to believe that there needs to be more competition in this space. Curious as to how you guys are going about it.
However, I believe there are certain restrictions surrounding the real time access of data. We haven't come up against that obstacle yet, since we're first attacking historical archiving of data after the fact, even if it's only 1 day after the games have been played.
Playerfilter (http://www.playerfilter.com) is built on top of an API that we are looking to expose to the public (use can see it being used in the URL hash). API support isn't live yet but we are working with beta testers. Basically, we return data for players, seasons and games over any time period since 1970. Please check it out and drop us a line if you'd be interested in more details.
Regarding scraping: I have a hard time figuring out what the difference is between having a human read a web page with sports scores on it, and then entering those scores in to your application vs. having a scraper grab those scores automatically. In most cases, these source web pages will be publicly available without requiring any agreement to a terms of service contract. Scraping a site and using the actual HTML i…
I don't know. I agree that the game scores, roster data, etc. are facts but at the same time work was performed at some point to compile that data so I assume there must be some legality around not simply copying it and reusing it. Of course I don't know for sure it's just a gut feeling. Wish I could find a definitive answer without having to pay legal consultation fees I can't afford.