The Supreme Court reversed a federal law that prohibits sports gambling today, voting 6-3 to strike down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA). PASPA is a 1992 law that barred state-authorized sports gambling with some exceptions, which made Nevada the only state where individuals could wager on any single sports event. Something that will undoubtedly have a profound effect on the sports industry, and of interest to us, on the sports data API “game”.
To ride on the wave of news we wanted to take a fresh look at what sports data APIs are available out there and begin profiling them for inclusion in the Streamdata.io API Gallery. The two strong sports data API providers we came across were these:
– My Sports Feeds – The BEST source for democratized, crowd-sourced sports data with a real-time API. Real-time and historical data available. Free API access for non-commercial use.
– My Sports Radar – Sportradar is a global leader in understanding and leveraging the power of sports data and digital content for clients across the world
Sports data is a heavily copyrighted and trademark landscape, with league entities aggressively defending their intellectual property. Making it a difficult space to operate in when it comes to API access. You can see this present with ESPN, who had shuttered public access to their APIs, leaving it only available to internal and strategic partner usage. You can still get at sports data as part of the Yahoo Fantasy Sports, but real My Sports Feeds and My Sports Radar are the two strongest providers out there today.
Neither provider appears to have a truly streaming API option. My Sports Radar has a “real time” package, but it appears to have more to do with rate limits, than the transport of the data. Making the landscape a pretty significant opportunity for delivering data using Server-Sent Events (SSE), and providing data updates using JSON Patch. We are going to profile these APIs and add to the Streamdata.io API Gallery, and we will share more stories about what is possible in this dimension of the API economy. It will take some time for the sports betting market to thaw, but as it does we want to make sure there are multiple options for getting at sports data as real-time streams, efficiently powering sports betting across the United States.
Follow us on social