Sports News App Aggregates Tweets Related to Your Favorite Teams

Sports fans that use a tablet or smartphone — the "second screen" — during live game broadcasts are becoming more and more common these days. For this year's Super Bowl, a Century 21 Real Estate survey found that 36% of polled viewers said they would use a second screen to supplement the game-viewing experience.

A Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup is catering to that trend with a new tablet app that aggregates real-time tweets from 1,000 media sources and 2,000 players. So if the game is on or you just want to see the chatter surrounding your favorite teams, the free "Beyond the Box" app by Murphy Ave. Inc. does the legwork for you with refined Twitter updates from interesting people, players and sources.

The app includes content covering NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL teams. You can pick your favorite teams to get timelines of updates, analysis and links from the app's various aggregated sources. For example, for my hometown football team — the Denver Broncos — I can instantly read tweets by everyone from linebacker Von Miller to SB Nation's Mile High Report to the team's official Twitter feed.

App co-founder Shailo Rao told Mashable that it brings everything together into one timeline, because he says it's hard to navigate to twenty different sports sites or apps that someone might frequently visit.

"[Beyond the Box] aggregates all the great content about your favorite teams or about other teams in the league that you just want to track," Rao said. "You'll get a different take that goes beyond what the TV commentators are telling you."

The app [iTunes link] launched Thursday and is currently only available for iPad and iPad Mini.

Rao, a self-professed sports junkie himself, said Beyond the Box reduces the need for sports fans to manually curate feeds: "Twitter is the new RSS."

He also said the app can allow fans to discover new sources, including the ability to engage directly with players and their thoughts through tweets.

"It's not just about what the local beat writer or what the team itself wants to pump out," Rao said.

Rao also pointed out that unlike competitors (think Turner Sports' Bleacher Report Team Stream and ESPN's SportsCenter Feed), Beyond the Box is not restricted by content restrictions or exclusive partnerships, which could eliminate bias that may come along with those things.

In the future, Rao said they might expand to college and international sports (e.g., world soccer and cricket).

Though you could likely just spend the time to curate your own Twitter lists of sources to follow instead, this app not only does that work for you, but it has a clean user interface. Even when a league is off-season, an app like this can be an interesting way to more easily follow the social conversation (like the ongoing NFL Draft 2013).

Rao, along with co-founder Vam Makam, are developing Beyond the Box in Stanford's accelerator, StartX.

Do you use sports news aggregator websites or apps? Let us know in the comments.

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