Going digital-only has boosted sports outlet The Score

The series: We look at decision makers among Canada’s mid-sized companies who took successful action in a competitive global digital economy.

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Whether it happens shortly after kickoff or deep into the fourth quarter, every NFL football game has a turning point.

So does the evolution of a business. For Toronto-based media company, The Score Inc., that pivot point occurred with the happy confluence of its cable television offering and football.

As a scrappy player sitting third behind the sports cable behemoths Rogers Sportsnet and Bell-owned TSN in Canada, The Score had been doing its own thing. That included making the most of the properties that went unwanted by the big two, such as non-Toronto Blue Jays baseball games or international soccer, building up a young and digitally-minded following in the process.

But when the NFL approached The Score in 2011 and asked it to bid on the rights to its fledgling Thursday Night Football property, wanting a new outlet and audience in Canada, the game was on.

Rogers ultimately outbid The Score for those rights and started to seriously consider purchasing its smaller competitor, following an interest it had first shown four years earlier.

But The Score, which had started life in 1994 as a sports ticker called Sportscope, had evolved along the way, introducing a mobile sports application as its audience started to switch to mobile.

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The launch of the iPhone and Android smartphones further developed that technology – indeed, The Score was one of the first sports apps available in Apple’s App Store. And while it was a hit in Canada, it was south of the border where it really made a dent, beating the likes of ESPN, CBS and NBC to the punch.

“It was fast, it was good, it gave information that other people didn’t give,” says John Levy, The Score’s chairman and founder. “We were ahead of all the U.S. guys, we were ahead of the Canadian guys. So we’re looking at [the app] saying, there are really no boundaries on this. It’s a product that could go global.”

Though The Score wasn’t ready the first time Rogers came calling, by 2012, five years after the introduction of its app, it decided to seize the moment, ultimately selling its TV arm to Rogers for $167-million. Despite the sale price, Mr. Levy says it was hard to let go of “our baby,” as he calls it, something he and his staff had built from scratch.

However, the timing was right.

“There are always doubts, always,” he says. “I was fairly confident that all the signs we were seeing were pointing to the fact that it was the right time to sell it, that the two [TV and app] were independent.”

The sale reduced The Score’s talent pool, however, with the TV arm taking much of the company’s 300 employees, with 60 making the transition to the digital side of the business, including just three of four software engineers.

Now up to 216 employees in total, including 81 involved in software and product development, Mr. Levy says that the talent is out there, but a company has to make itself attractive to new hires.

“Toronto is amazing, one of the best markets in the world for talent, for resources, but all the big companies are here, so now you’re having to compete for that talent,” he says.

Always building around a mobile-first strategy, where its app wasn’t merely an afterthought or simply a means for promoting its TV assets, the decision to divest the TV portion has allowed The Score even greater flexibility in its decision-making.

One of the things that has always set The Score apart from its competitors is its willingness to listen to what its audience wants. As Mr. Levy says, the company has never taken a top-down approach, with experts in three-piece suits telling viewers or consumers what to think or what to watch.

As a result, the company is watching closely to see how the legalization of sports betting in the United States will unfold. In particular, it is interested in how that might be incorporated into its app, which is currently used by 3.9-million monthly users on average, making it the second-most popular sports app in North America, according to media measurement company comScore.

The downloads are still dominated by the United States, however, with 65 per cent coming from south of the border, according to Mr. Levy, 20 per cent from Canada, and the rest of the world making up the rest.

According to Paul Dowman, chief technology officer for Toronto-based software development company, Ok Grow!, The Score has taken a smart approach toward its mobile offering, always placing the emphasis on mobile first.

“You should look at it as an entirely new thing,” he says. “It used to be called the second screen. Maybe now it’s really the first screen.”

Mr. Dowman says our reliance on mobile will continue to grow, particularly as companies develop more and better ways to engage with audiences and their phones, pointing to virtual reality as the latest example.

Pushing the boundaries also becomes important when it comes to attracting and retaining talent in the software development sector. No longer being beholden to a legacy business, such as television, actually gives The Score an advantage in some ways, he adds.

“Having your developers be able to move forward with interesting ways of doing things is very important,” he says. “If they feel they’re just working on something that is part of a legacy business, it’s less exciting and sometimes harder to attract talent.”

Any app developer would do well to listen to their audience, as well. How we interact with our smartphones, and the communities to which they connect us, is a highly personal experience, Mr. Dowman says. When it comes to a smartphone app, being able to customize the experience goes a long way toward the consumer enjoying the results, particularly when it comes to managing the amount of notifications that an app might transmit.

He cites the way that the Facebook Messenger app became a separate entity from Facebook, designed for people who didn’t necessarily want to open Facebook every time they wanted to send a message using that method.

“You have to be able to allow people to tailor [the app] to how much they want to use it,” he says. “Some people’s threshold of the number of acceptable interruptions may be higher than other people’s, so if you don’t allow people to tailor it a little bit then you’re going to lose some of them.”