3 ms·
Ask HN: How to get reliable live sports data?
To give some context, I have been working on a plain text cricket score site1 that loads fast and scores can be viewed instantly even from a terminal.
The problem I faced was getting reliable data. I tried with the ESPN endpoints and RSS feed, but they have limits in place and cannot be fetched every minute.
Currently I'm using Cricketdata.org2 API which costs me $12 a month. I'm okay with paying that but the API is not reliable and the support is very poor! For instance today, they swapped the team 1 and 2 in their API results!
So my question is how do folks like ESPN or Cricbuzz get data? Do they have people sitting and watching live broadcast and entering stuff on a form or something?
If you have worked on something similar, would love to hear your thoughts and may share some resources which I can refer to!
[1] https://criclite.com
[2] https://cricketdata.org/
- Alex-Programs 2y agoMaybe you could feed data from relevant fan subreddits into an LLM to extract results from discussions? Sure, it's poor quality data, but there's presumably quite a lot of it.
- rishikeshs 2y agoI was looking for live score data. Not sure how I can get that from discussions
- Alex-Programs 2y agoPeople will presumably quite quickly start discussing events. Score data can be inferred from that.
- rishikeshs 2y agoInteresting! That’s a great angle to look at. But don’t know how hard it would be to process the data.
- Alex-Programs 2y agoThat's why you pass it to a big, clever neural network with some reasoning and let it figure it out for you. Put multiple different sources through multiple different LLMs and take a consensus of them. If there isn't a clear winner, declare it uncertain. It'd be a bit of a bodge, but it'd work. If you can get a live feed of the broadcast, you could also try feeding visual information in to be processed by a multimodal LLM.
- rishikeshs 2y agoI was thinking something like this: Have the cricket score site open in a VM or something. Then a webjob can take screenshots and process the screenshot to extract the score.