NBA to launch Turnstile check-in app for games

October 19, 2010 9:13 AM
Cody Barbierri
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The National Basketball League (NBA) may be looking to take advantage of the growing popularity of consumers checking-in to locations through its own application dubbed Turnstile, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The new application is supposed to be released with the start of the new season later this month and will focus on giving fans the ability to check-in to games both in-person and while watching on the television. A smart move as many fans aren’t able to physically make it to an arena, but may be avid fans –  watching every game from home.

A fan who checks-in will have their location and update shared with the majority of the major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. However, the app won’t just be for check-ins, but also offer fans real-time game stats and highlights as well as discounts and rewards if physically at a game.

As pointed out by the WSJ, the NBA isn’t the only one looking to take advantage of fans checking-in to games. The National Hockey League started using Foursquare to give fans tips and hints for finding freebies within venues. Some National Football League teams, like the Washington Redskins, are also experimenting with Foursquare as well as location-based service newcomer Scvngr, which is about to hit 500,000 users according to the company’s Blag (yes, Blag – they are Bostonians).

The application will be free and available for Blackberry, iPhone and Android devices.

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    I salute the major sports networks for building duplicative apps that noone will use. Ive even heard that they are going to be coming up with their own crappy devices to hand to fans at games.Once people start streaming the games from their chairs over their cellphones (which will happen), there will be many feeds from people at the game you can switch from to alternate vantage points, and the major sports organizations will be forced to block cell signals inside the stadiums to protect their precious content.As usual although they promise integration the major sports peddlers miss the point. Everyone can already say they are at the game. So eventually this will amount to them handing a bunch of money to twitter, foursquare and facebook to do it right.Good for twitter, foursqueare and facebook. But we all know, location is a stupid feature. The more money corporate america wastes on it the better.

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