If you’ve ever played daily fantasy sports you’re familiar with the standard workflow – you browse 5 or 6 sites to research players, switch over to the FanDuel or DraftKings app to pick your lineup, then go right back to switching between those sites to make sure nothing changes before kickoff.
FanDuel wants to condense this research into one place, so it’s launching a new companion app called Scout which supports your NFL and MLB lineups, with NBA and NHL coming soon.
The app connects to your FanDuel account so you can import lineups, then tracks every player on the team. This means you’ll see news stories in the app’s main feed related to these players, making it easy to track things like last-minute injuries or additions. You can also add players to a watchlist in case you want to track and research them before you actually add them to a lineup.
Scout is similar to DK Live, DraftKings’ companion research app they launched last year at TC Disrupt SF 2017.
Giving players a centralized hub for player research accomplishes two things for FanDuel: First, it helps level the playing field for rookie players who may not know the best places to get up to date information on their lineups. Second, it keeps players in the FanDuel ecosystem, which is much better than having them spend their time on other fantasy sports news sites (which could eventually offer daily fantasy sports and become a competitor to FanDuel).
Data in the app is coming from numberFire, a sports analytics company that creates 30-40 pieces of original content each day focusing on fantasy players. They also are populating the app with game schedules and spreads.
Right now this is basically the extent of Scout – but eventually FanDuel wants to add features that make the app more useful when you’re watching games – like live scoring and stat tracking of players on your drafted teams, as well as the aggregation of original news from outlets beyond numberFire.
Check out Scout on the iOS App Store here.