The live phonecasting service, ipadio, announced today that it will be providing technology to support the partnership between Sport England and Facebook. The partnership is helping people play more sports in the run up to London 2012.
Sport England and Facebook recently launched a Facebook tool named the ‘Community Sport Hub’. Its main purpose is to allow sports governing bodies to interact with over 20 million UK Facebook users.
The Hub is designed as a Facebook fan page but offers new and specific applications, including ipadio. For The Hub, ipadio is making it possible for sports bodies to market and organize grassroots sports events. With this application, Facebook users are able to challenge other local people to a competition, no matter what sport is chosen, and then announce the outcome live with their Facebook friends and networks.
The Hub is a platform offering Facebook applications to national governing bodies and other users. ipadio’s will play a role as part of this group of applications by delivering live commentary, opinion, interviews and a rich media experience directly into the Hub. This new application creates the ability for users to broadcast live, or record to upload a broadcast via iPhone and android apps, from any phone across the globe. Broadcasts have been made from the World Transplant Games in Australia, Kayaking championships in Switzerland as well as from golf, rugby, football, handball, athletics and many more events across the country.
The Community Sports Hub has been established to change the way sports bodies interact with participants as they work on efforts to deliver on London’s Olympic legacy, with a promise of one million people playing more sports by 2012. In efforts to reach this goal, the British Universities and Colleges Sport (BUCS) will offer table tennis, squash and racketball, badminton, Judo, athletics and volleyball to students and young Facebook user as part of a pilot plan. The aim of the program is to get 12,000 students participating in more physical activity in four months.
CEO of ipadio, Dr. Mark K. Smith commented, “With the rich sporting heritage of Nemisys behind ipadio, it is no surprise that ipadio is already being taken up by many major sports in the UK, but by providing a bespoke player into this major project will give us deeper reach into the massive success story that is Facebook”.
ipadio is a spin out of digital communication company Nemisys, the digital experts in developing creative and effective Websites and online applications. The company’s expertise and knowledge has been displayed in the development of ipadio.
Sport England invests National Lottery and Exchequer funding in organizations and projects designed to grow and sustain participation in grassroots sports, and to create an opportunity for each individual to reach goals in each chosen sport. Some of their main targeted goals for 2012/2013, are to get 1 million people to become active in more sports, achieve a 25% reduction in the number of older teens who drop out of five or more key sports, and to improve talent development systems in 25 or more sports.
Sport England’s Commercial Director, Thomas Godfrey remarked, “Sport England sees ipadio as a means of bringing the excitement and action of sport directly to budding sports participants in seconds. From now on, sports governing bodies will have the ability to deliver live commentary of their events straight to their audiences in a way that suits them”.
For More Information, please contact Mark Smith of ipadio at mark.smith@ipadio.com.