The Carolina Panthers and Denver Broncos will play Super Bowl 50 on Feb. 7 at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California — in the heart of Silicon Valley. One of the region's most ubiquitous companies, Facebook, hopes you'll supplement watching the game with following it on the social media service.
On Jan. 21, Facebook launched Facebook Sports Stadium, which it hopes will turn the website and app into a one-stop shop for sports fans. While your general news feed on Super Bowl Sunday will likely be filled with any number of random observations from friends and the pages you follow about the game, the halftime show and the commercials, Facebook Sports Stadium will have tabs for live game updates and matchup info, your friends' commentary, expert commentary and live stats.
Facebook's timing meant its first live games were the NFL's conference championship games last weekend, which roped in a combined 99 million viewers on CBS and Fox. Right now, the service is only available on Facebook's iPhone app, and can be accessed by searching for a game in the app's search bar.
But the debut of the sports service inside Facebook came with a few hiccups. CNET's Terry Collins reported that locating the feature was difficult, with no explicit link to enter Facebook Sports Stadium. In a related manner, Collins commented on the functionality to talk to friends about the game: "But something was missing in the Friends tab: my friends. Almost no one was posting anything."
Image: Facebook
Among social media platforms, Facebook is in a dominant position, both globally and in the U.S., as its number of active users far outstrips those of Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Vine, among others. But it's clearly not the best for a second-screen experience while watching live sports. Twitter and its real-time display of content is.
Twitter's utility for watching live sports is such that the NBA devotes a section of its homepage to which players are getting the most mentions on the platform. Twitter has also run television ads promoting the league and how it can be used in conjunction with pro basketball. Even in the offseason, the platform has at times been entangled with the biggest stories in the NBA.
It's no secret that Twitter has been struggling businesswise for a while. Recently, there was a big shakeup with several of its executives departing, which followed a rocky 2015. By introducing Facebook Sports Stadium, Zuckerberg & Co. are hoping they can cut into one of the main things for which many people still log onto Twitter. If Facebook is successful in its sports venture, it may be another nail in Twitter's potential coffin.
However, with Facebook Sports Stadium having other functions besides seeing what people are saying about a game, some are predicting it may not take Twitter's place, but rather that of popular scoreboard apps, like those from ESPN and Yahoo Sports.
Facebook Sports Stadium is currently only available for NFL games, but it plans to expand to NBA and soccer games in the near future.
