Streaming cable television service Fubo is testing the deployment of personalized push alerts to its subscribers during the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) playoffs tournament.
The alerts include notifications of games that are about to start, as well as in-game statistics like sports scores and critical moments. They primarily involve games airing on Walt Disney Company-owned ESPN, as Fubo doesn’t have the rights to games offered on Warner Bros Discovery’s TNT Sports channels. ESPN and TNT Sports share the rights to the NBA playoffs, with ESPN serving as the exclusive national broadcaster of the NBA Finals. Awful Announcing was the first to report on the Fubo push alerts.
Sports-related push alerts are nothing new — many apps, including ESPN’s own, have offered them as a way to engage sports fans before, during and after games. Apple launched a dedicated sports app on its iPhone devices last year, which provide real-time sports scores and personalized alerts across teams and leagues, and other companies like SiriusXM have leaned into the delivery of personalized sports notifications as a way to draw sports fans into their apps.
Fubo appears to be taking the best practices from other sports apps, and bake them into their new notification feature, which allows subscribers to instantly catch up to a game when they interact with them on their phones and tablets. Once inside the Fubo app, streamers can also launch customizable multi-view windows across most supported channels — the feature has long been offered on Apple TV, and recently became available on Roku Ultra devices — which stands in contrast to multiview offerings from others like YouTube TV, which pre-select games and channels with extremely limited options for customizing them.
While Fubo subscribers lack access to some NBA playoff games because of the company’s lack of a distribution agreement with TNT Sports, Fubo will almost certainly leverage the insights gleamed from how subscribers interact with their push alerts to deploy more-customizable notifications in the future, super-serving fans of baseball, football, hockey and other sports over time.
Fubo offers three tiers of service — Pro (starts at $85 per month), Elite (starts at $95 per month) and Latino ($15 per month). The first two plans include streaming access to local broadcast stations (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, CW Network), regional sports channels and national cable networks like ESPN, Fox Sports 1, CBS Sports Network, NFL Network, NHL Network and MLB Network. Both packages also require subscribers to pay separate regional sports fees and taxes, which lift the overall cost of the package above the advertised price.
Fubo Latino includes more than 50 channels of Spanish-language programming, and is one of the few streaming cable alternatives to offer a dedicated package of Spanish channels to those who want access to live TV without cable or satellite.
