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Project Overview

The official SBS Tour de France application provides a live mobile experience for the Tour de France, allowing in depth access of every aspect of the world's biggest and most exciting cycling road race.

Organisation

SBS

Team

Toby Forage (SBS)
Allan Padgett (Tour Tracker)
Justin Young (SBS)

Project Brief

The SBS Tour Tracker prime purpose was to put all the live action from the Tour de France into the user’s hands. The Tour is the world’s biggest annual sporting event, and is watched by millions of people across the world.

Key features of the SBS Tour Tracker include live video streaming, GPS tracking of the peloton and breakaways on interactive maps and stage profiles, and up-to-the-minute text commentary from Race Radio Tour. The app also carries daily results and standings in ever classification, video highlights of each stage, team and rider listings and profiles plus stage descriptions, map, profile and details of all King of the Mountain and Sprint points and feed stations on every route. There is also social media integration, with key riders, teams and cycling experts’ tweets aggregated in the app.

Project Innovation / Need

The SBS Tour Tracker app allows users to follow the world’s biggest annual sporting event in detail from any location when not close to a TV live and in real time. It is also useful as a second screen, providing live data from the race and access to selected social media chatter from teams, riders and cycling experts all in one app.

Being free of charge, the app provides more than most paid-for apps can, which is an innovation in itself.

User Experience

User feedback for the SBS Tour Tracker apps was almost exclusively positive (iOS 5 star rating average, Android 4 star rating average). Users found the UI very easy to follow. Upon starting up the app, users were taken to the live action, if it was on at that time, and offered highlights and results from the opening screen outside of live broadcast times.

Simple navigation allowed users to find all the information within one touch of the screen, making the app extremely simple to use and enjoy.

Project Marketing

Marketing of the Tour de France is key at SBS, and the SBS Tour Tracker was very much a part of that campaign. It was featured in an on air campaign, given in broadcast mentions, plugged via SBS cycling social media channels (around 40,000 people) and also featured in the SBS Tour de France eDM, which reaches about 60,000.

With close to 250,000 iOS downloads, and more than 60,000 Android downloads, it’s fair to say the marketing campaign as a whole was a major success.