For years, digital platforms like streaming services and sports apps worked in a simple way: they broadcasted, their audiences consumed it, without giving much feedback. All emotions stayed somewhere outdoors. If viewers wanted to discuss what they had just seen, they had to go to social media (or offline).
This created a silent usage, when the energy of the fans flows out into third-party platforms. The leading apps and broadcasters are changing this by giving users a social component of live streaming chat, reactions and simple ways to talk to each other — right on the screen, inside the application.
From Passive Viewing to Active Participation
This is the difference between merely giving people just content and giving them also a community. If a user has to leave for a third-party platform every time they want to talk about the goals they’ve seen or the plot twists they’ve experienced, the app loses out on the user’s time, data and potential to spend money. When you give users a way to connect with other people inside the app, you turn them from passive viewers into active participants. The app becomes a kind of “town square” that they feel attached to — not just something they open once a week, but a place they keep coming back to.
The Infrastructure of the Digital Stadium
One of the major challenges in creating this space is building the infrastructure of a digital stadium: an environment where tens of thousands of people can talk and react in real time to what they’re watching.
The solution that Watchers provides is based on WebView, which has several advantages over other approaches:
- Fast integration. The social component can be integrated in roughly one sprint, saving months of development time.
- Instant updates. Using an embeddable browser engine allows the app to roll out new features or UI tweaks without going through the full App Store review process.
- Smooth customisation. Chat and widgets are styled as if they had always been part of the platform and can be aligned closely with the brand’s visual identity.
Driving Metrics with Social Features
Turning fandom into a social experience isn’t only about “engagement”; it directly supports key business metrics:
- Retention. Users spend more time on platforms that offer rich social features and real conversation.
- Monetisation. Social widgets let users share their purchasing decisions (for example, memberships or merchandise) and allow others to copy them with a single click.
- AI-powered translation. Removing language barriers helps fans from different countries join the same social space and turns local chats into global stadiums.
Safety: The Foundation of Community
Fans won’t stay if the space doesn’t feel safe. To protect both users and the brand, a new social layer has to come with solid chat moderation, with a five-layer moderation system which is much more sufficient than social media policies, at least because the app owners are in response for community rules.
- Pre-moderation. Messages are checked before they are published.
- Masking. Personal details like phone numbers and bank account numbers are automatically hidden from both the community and moderators because data safety is of the highest importance.
- AI moderation. AI-powered models are necessary for instance and fast content, as sports games. Such models scan messages and images for toxic content, scams and spam and prevent its visibility.
- User moderation. Users can hide unwanted accounts for themselves and can flag messages for the system to check.
- Manual moderation. A moderation dashboard allows human moderators to deal with serious or borderline cases.
Why Social Features Matter Now
Having good content is no longer enough when users have endless choices of what to watch and where to spend their time. People also need a sense of belonging. The social layer helps platforms move from being a simple tool to becoming a place where users want to spend more time due to a community of likeminded peoples. When you host that social experience inside your own product, users spend their time with you, and that time, along with the data and revenue it generates, belongs to the platform, not to a third party. And money you spent to buy sports broadcasting rights give you much better results.
Price publication: 40.00 USD
Total: 40.00 USD