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

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

#1

Post by sga »

This is a long standing question of mine reignited by bignoggins post at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772224 where he described the success of http://www.fantasymonsterapp.com.

I've often thought of building sports related apps (esp. pertaining to fantasy sports) but I've always struggled with how to legally obtain the necessary data (scheduling, statistics, player images, team logos, etc.) such that I can pursue it as a commercial venture. An obvious solution is to simply scrape the info but I'd assume you'd get shut down or blocked rather quickly. Yahoo offers a Fantasy Sports API but it's to be used for non-commercial purposes only.

Can anyone shed light on where/how to obtain current and past sports data that is available for commercial use? (I'm most interested in NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL data)

Thanks!

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

#2

Post by iheartmemcache »

This[1] StackOverflow thread answers this question pretty thoroughly. Unfortunately it looks like if you want it to be legal, you should be prepared to pay a hefty (> 4 figures) monthly subscription fee.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/57106/anyone-know-of-an-n...

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

#3

Post by jat850 »

In my previous development experience for a fantasy gaming website, I dealt with Stats Inc and the API/datasets they provided.

Without permission I don't think it would be fair for me to provide you a direct contact, but they did offer all of the data our site required, in useable formats.

Our initial site only dealt with the NBA as they provided the best avenue for use of their logos and player names.

Feel free to contact me more directly if you want a bit more info.

Best of luck!

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

#4

Post by mccutchen »

I too have wondered about this for a couple of minor side projects. I've always resorted to scraping, but it feels wrong and I know it's not feasible for commercial projects.

I've always assumed that there was some commercial data source out there that would provide all of this information in a nice, structured format for some kind of fee, but I have yet to find it.

One nice thing about major sites moving to "live" scoreboards is that you can often find nicely structured data sources behind them. For instance, here's the NFL's live score feed, in JSON:

http://www.nfl.com/liveupdate/scores/scores.json

(Unfortunately, it's empty as I write this because there are no games going on right now. Here's an example taken late on a Sunday or on Monday morning: http://gist.github.com/626612)

Another, related question is how to get good gambling information (point spreads, totals, etc.) for the same use case. I think this might be easier, as I've come across various sports book sites in the past that offer subscription services.

On Yahoo's NFL odds page, it says their data source is OddsShark (http://www.oddsshark.com/) whose home page advertises

  Offer comparative live odds and other sports stats on your site FREE of charge.

  You pick the sportsbooks, you pick the bet types and OddsShark.com sports betting odds engine does the rest, delivering feeds to your site.
I got in touch with them, but never received a response...

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

#8

Post by retree »

The situation in the UK, is that anything (and this includes fixtures, logos, statistics, even live twitter score updates) has to be licensed through a company called Football DataCo. The costs coming to ~$6000/season just for fixtures. You can't even use names that sound similar. For example calling Liverpool 'Merseyside Red'. [1]

They enforce this strongly, outsourcing it to a company who only does this sort of thing.

[1] http://www.epltalk.com/2010-11-premier-league-opening-day-fi...

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

#9

Post by dustym »

I've worked with STATS, Inc and XML Team. I've also implemented features against the Yahoo! Fantasy API and it was very nice to work with.

First off, you are going to have to deal with a rep.

STATS is the big name in the business and they feed, at least partially, many stat resellers from who you might be able to get cheaper rates. From there I'd say you should find a cheap service or a mechanism (scraping, etc) that gives you just enough data to work with and start building against it. Look at XML team for competitive pricing. If you get to the point where your app is past prototype, you should then investigate buying into the full service.

Depending on the day and the feed, wrangling sports data is awesome or horrible or both.

On the subject of scraping, I'm not sure what the legalities are. Obviously you are probably violating the TOS of any site you are visiting if you grab the data, but at the same time, strikes, balls and fouls are facts of the game.

Images and logos are sometimes provided by sports data brokers.

Take a look at http://www.stats.com/ and http://www.xmlteam.com/

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

#10

Post by ironblunt »

We do mostly baseball and in our first year, we used a bunch of retrosheet data for historical data and we went with BIS for current season data. They're pretty laid back and their data was pretty detailed for us. Recently, we went with MLB.com's xml data over at http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/ where we had to do a bunch more calculations to get all the data we wanted, but it's free (for now).

We also looked at XML Team and I found their prices to be completely reasonable and they have a per document pricing structure which allows you to control your costs to a much greater extend.

We also spoke with Stats Inc and found them to be pretty unreasonable in terms of dealing with startups and for home projects.

Hit me up if you want any more data or if Benchcoach can help with the data on the baseball side. We're looking at expanding it to football and basketball this year so we've been speaking with XML team about that.

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