Sports media leader ESPN Inc. twice has turned to local companies to develop new online offerings in recent months.
In January, the Pawtucket-based digital media firm Shazamm Global Interactive Agency debuted a brand-new version of ESPNeventmedia.com, an online portal for the X Games, ESPN’s annual extreme sports tournament. Shazamm created the original version of ESPN Eventmedia in 1999.
This year’s relaunch of the site was timed to coincide with ESPN’s Winter X Games 13, which took place in January in Aspen, Colo. The site offers photos, information on athletes, event guides and press materials.
“Eventmedia has grown as Shazamm has grown,” Shazamm CEO Dana Paul said in a statement. “What started as an experiment – offering the media a handful of photos at a single event back in 1999 – has now evolved to an archive of almost 40,000 images.”
ESPN, which is owned by The Walt Disney Co., said Winter X Games 13 was the most popular edition of the franchise so far, with television ratings up 9 percent from last year. Winter X Games 14 is scheduled to take place next January in Aspen.
Shazamm, a division of Warwick-based Atrion Networking Corp., developed a similar site for ESPN Outdoors Media. Both sites use ZMedia, a Web-based content management system developed by Shazamm. The firm also has done work for American Express, Hasbro and the magazine Field & Stream.
Separately, the Providence statistical analysis firm Minimax Consulting Group announced last month that it had created a special Bracket Optimizer for ESPN.com to help college basketball fans maximize their chances of winning their NCAA pool.
The optimizer tool, which was taken down after the tournament got under way, “uses artificial intelligence algorithms, game theory and the results of millions of Monte Carlo simulations to forecast all of the possible ways in competitors might choose their brackets,” Minimax said in a news release.
“After making one’s picks, the tool spits out an Expected Value, which is the value a fan is projected to achieve in their pool if they use the Bracket Optimizer’s recommended picks,” the firm explained.
