FanHub and PubNub Power Leading Interactive Sports Fan Apps

Live scores without refresh is what our users love.

FanHub Media is a provider of fan interaction experiences for the sports industry. FanHub tailors modules from its platform to create various digital games and second screen experiences such as fantasy sports, predictor, betting, content integration, live scoring and tracking, voting and polling, and user behavior analysis.

Real-time, Interactive Experiences

To deliver real-time, interactive second screen experiences, FanHub required a way to stream and sync data across connected devices. With sports, rapid delivery of data is essential, and lag or downtime is unacceptable for connected users. Reliability and speed were paramount considerations for the FanHub in the games and other experiences that it offers. In FanHub’s case, they needed to be able to deliver notifications, updates, and alerts, as well as update and sync front end UI, all in real time. From the early stages of development of their real-time backend, FanHub knew they wanted to use a commercial data stream network. With a large audience and the requirement of real-time, FanHub chose the PubNub Data Stream Network. "We have successfully built our own solutions previously, but felt PubNub would be the ideal solution given the scale of our products and the size of our audience," said Andrew Cronyn, Director of FanHub.

Real-time Networks Power Real-time Experiences

PubNub powers a number of the real-time features of the FanHub platform. With PubNub Pub/Sub Messaging, users can message each other in real time, and score updates and notifications are pushed to users as they happen, while to power online fantasy drafts, PubNub is used extensively to enable the application to notify users that it is their turn to make a selection. From a UI update standpoint, PubNub is used to change and synchronize game states, for example, switching from “pre-game” to “live round” and triggering changes on the front end. PubNub implementation and testing was seamless for the FanHub development team, and integration allowed FanHub to focus on their product, not building a backend real-time infrastructure.

PubNub sped up the development process and reduced our infrastructure costs. We’re happy to have PubNub maintaining the solution.

Check out the FanHub platform, implemented in the image below (click for full size):