How Do Sports Apps Stay Up To Date In Real Time?
A service provided by invisible APIs
With the click of a button or the flick of a finger, almost anyone in the world can pull up scores from current or recent sports games. This information is often perfect in accuracy and updated in real time, allowing fans and bettors to retrieve information on the fly. But how is this information parsed? Is there an army of stat crunching interns scattered in offices around the world furiously entering information as it comes in? Or is something else happening? How do these sports apps (and websites) keep so much incremental data up to date?
Many times, these apps go far beyond simply keeping track of scores. They can also track stats in real time, including individual pitches during a baseball game and individual yards being accrued in real time by players on the gridiron. It is something that modern sports fans take for granted, and the technology underpinning the whole enterprise is fascinating.
The collection and distribution of sports data is managed by a series of advanced Application Programming Interfaces or APIs. According to Amazon Web Services:
APIs are mechanisms that enable two software components to communicate with each other using a set of definitions and protocols. For example, the weather bureau’s software…
