Fantasy Football: where can I get a live stat feed?

[edmicman]

Sort of a software/programming question, but not really. I want to make a stattracker program (like Yahoo's) for fantasy football, where my league can get an updated look at our points, etc., as a game is going on. I hate paying for that. Anyway, I don't figure the putting it together part would be to hard if I had a way to get all the stats of the players and games as they are happening. I'm assuming that all the sports sites must have some sort of text feed or something with stats that are automatically loaded and that in turn update the websites. They can't have people manually editing things, can they?!? I figure if there was a text snapshot or something of all the stats for that day that I could download every few minutes or something, load that into a database and then build an app off that, it would be cool. Soooooo....anyone have any ideas where I might find such a thing? Is it even possible? Am I out of my mind? TIA

 

[Electric Amish]

I've been looking for this too!!!

amish

 

[Izzo]

Let me know what you find out.

 

[edmicman]

Poking around google led me to a couple of services, Sportsticker by ESPN and one called STATS, Inc. which seem to provide feed services to most places around the internet.....but I want free!! Does the AP have a source or something? Maybe its just gonna die as a cool idea but costing too much to implement....ah well. I would have thought more people on here would have had an idea!

 

[Izzo]

Originally posted by: edmicman
I would have thought more people on here would have had an idea!

Eh. You'd get more responses if the thread were a repost or about girls/cars. *shrug*

 

[Muadib]

I want to hit the lottery too, but odds are it ain't gonna happen. Just do like we do in my league, and add it in as dues which are due before the draft. We've used CBS the last few years.

 

[Electric Amish]

Poking around google led me to a couple of services, Sportsticker by ESPN and one called STATS, Inc. which seem to provide feed services to most places around the internet.....but I want free!! Does the AP have a source or something? Maybe its just gonna die as a cool idea but costing too much to implement....ah well. I would have thought more people on here would have had an idea!

Did you find any pricing? How much?

 

[pyonir]

I doubt you are going to find a free live service such as this. You can't even get free live scoring on Yahoo or Sandbox if you register for their games...

 

[Garet Jax]

I did this research some time ago. Unfortunately, the services are intended for use by large companies (ESPN, Yahoo, NHL, etc...) and they price it accordingly. As I recall, the prices were at least 5 digits.

The only consumer level product I was able to find was for $600 (I think). For this they would put a live scoreboard into your room and it would be fed live scores for games.

There is nothing intended for home use the way you described. 🙁

 

[Double Trouble]

The NFL owns all those stats and charges for them. You're very unlikely to find a free source of streaming live stats.

There is another way though, and I've toyed with it a little.... What you have to do is basically run a bot to keep grabbing NFL.com's updated pages (for each game). You then do a little PERL parsing of the data, and bingo, you have live updated stats.

 

[Electric Amish]

Originally posted by: tagej
The NFL owns all those stats and charges for them. You're very unlikely to find a free source of streaming live stats.

There is another way though, and I've toyed with it a little.... What you have to do is basically run a bot to keep grabbing NFL.com's updated pages (for each game). You then do a little PERL parsing of the data, and bingo, you have live updated stats.

I've been working on that too. Stupid regular expressions always kick my butt. :|

amish

 

[Cerebus451]

Originally posted by: Electric Amish

Originally posted by: tagej
The NFL owns all those stats and charges for them. You're very unlikely to find a free source of streaming live stats.

There is another way though, and I've toyed with it a little.... What you have to do is basically run a bot to keep grabbing NFL.com's updated pages (for each game). You then do a little PERL parsing of the data, and bingo, you have live updated stats.

I've been working on that too. Stupid regular expressions always kick my butt. :|

amish

When we looked at this a year ago for our league, someone had a piece of software that did this. You put in the list of URLs for the games and it would go out and update the stats. Didn't look too much into it. The service we use is $50 for the year, so we just tacked $5 on to the league fees. I personally didn't care because I don't need to track my team's score as the games progress and I was just as happy to see updated scores on Monday and Tuesday mornings.

As for buying the stats from a service, what we did find was quite expensive since they are priced for people that will be running a commissioner service, not for someone running a website for a single league.

 

[Double Trouble]

FFLM has a nice software package that includes stat updates every couple of hours. It only runs $40, which isn't bad... but it's not going to get you live update stats. Either you snag them off the site, or you'll have to make due with updates to the stats every couple of hours. Those that want to see live updates will just have to keep an eye on NFL.com.

 

[Muadib]

It's not free, but it will do what you want.

 

[edmicman]

thanks for all the input....looks like what i wanted to do is just out of my reach....heh, i knew yahoo and cbs offered realtime stats with their pay leagues....i was just looking for a free alternative.

hmmmm maybe i'll recruit an army of monkeys to watch all the games or ESPN's page and manually update my application...anyone know any good deals on helper monkeys? 😛

 

[Justin218]

pay for the yahoo stat tracker, it's like 10 bucks for the year.