Most sports apps are designed around content catalogs. The home screen shows what is available — live games, recent highlights, upcoming events — organized by recency or popularity. This works reasonably well for a casual viewer. It does not work well for a fan who cares deeply about one team and has limited patience for content about teams they do not follow. Designing around the fan's favorite team requires a different starting point.
A platform serving a conference has to make a fundamental navigation decision: does the primary organizational structure reflect the conference, or does it reflect the individual teams within it?
Conference-level navigation organizes content by conference structure: conference games, conference standings, conference championships. This makes sense from the conference's institutional perspective, and it serves fans who follow the conference broadly — journalists, analysts, fans of multiple schools. But it is not how most fans think about their relationship to college sports. A fan of one school does not primarily think of themselves as a conference fan who happens to prefer one team. They think of themselves as a fan of that school.
Team-level navigation puts the individual school at the center. The fan selects their school, and the app reorganizes around it: the home screen shows that school's schedule, that school's recent content, that school's standings. The conference structure is still accessible — for rivalry games, conference standings, postseason content — but it is not the primary organizing principle.
The right answer depends on the platform's primary audience. A conference-operated platform serving a broad audience of conference followers may reasonably lead with conference-level navigation. A platform designed to deepen the relationship between individual schools and their fans should lead with team-level navigation. VIP's approach is to support both, with the fan's declared preferences determining which view they see by default.
Favorite team selection should happen early in the onboarding flow, before the fan has seen the full content catalog. Asking a fan to browse the catalog and then select their team is backwards — it means they see a generic experience first, which sets a low bar for what the app can do. Asking them to select their team first means the first experience they have with the app is already personalized to them.
In a multi-sport platform, favorite sport selection adds a second layer of personalization. A fan who follows football and basketball but not other sports should be able to indicate that, so the app does not surface volleyball and swimming content with the same prominence as their primary sports. This is not about hiding content — it is about organizing it so that what the fan cares about most is easiest to find.
Both selections should be easy to change. Fan preferences evolve. A fan who primarily followed football may develop an interest in basketball during a successful season. A fan who transfers schools, or whose child transfers, may need to update their primary team. The settings for favorite team and favorite sport should be accessible and clearly labeled, not buried in a multi-level settings menu.
A personalized schedule shows the fan the games they care about, in chronological order, with clear information about how to watch each one. For a fan following a single team, this is straightforward. For a fan following multiple teams or sports, the schedule needs to aggregate across all of them without becoming overwhelming.
Game reminders — push notifications sent before a game starts — are one of the most valuable features in a sports app, and one of the most easily abused. A fan who receives too many notifications, or notifications for games they do not care about, will turn off notifications entirely. The notification system needs to be scoped to the fan's declared preferences: reminders only for their favorite team's games, or for specific sports they have indicated they follow.
The timing of game reminders matters. A reminder sent 15 minutes before a game starts is useful. A reminder sent 24 hours before is less useful for a fan who already knows their team's schedule. The default timing should be configurable, and the fan should be able to set different reminder windows for different types of content — a longer lead time for a major rivalry game, a shorter lead time for a regular-season game.
Highlights and replays are the content that fans return to most frequently between live events. A fan who watched their team win a close game wants to be able to find the highlights easily the next morning. A fan who missed a game wants to find the full replay without having to search through a catalog organized by date or by sport.
Organizing highlights and replays by team — so that a fan can navigate directly to their team's content library — is more useful than organizing by date or by event type. Within the team's content library, recency is the right default sort: the most recent game first, with older content accessible by scrolling or filtering.
Highlight clips — shorter edits of key moments from a game — serve a different purpose than full replays. A fan who has 90 seconds wants a highlight clip. A fan who has 90 minutes wants the full replay. Both should be available, clearly labeled, and easy to find. Mixing them in the same undifferentiated list makes both harder to find.
Personalization in a sports app is not primarily a technical feature — it is a product philosophy. The question it answers is: whose interests does the app serve? A generic content catalog serves the platform's interest in showing everything it has. A personalized experience serves the fan's interest in finding what they care about quickly.
Fans who find what they want quickly open the app more often. Fans who have to search through irrelevant content open it less often. Over time, the difference in engagement between a personalized and a generic experience compounds. A fan who opens the app daily during the season is a very different fan — in terms of advertising value, subscription retention, and commercial engagement — than a fan who opens it once a week.
This is why VIP treats favorite team selection as a foundational design decision rather than a nice-to-have feature. It is the signal that makes everything else in the personalization stack more useful: the schedule, the notifications, the content recommendations, the advertising targeting. Without it, the platform is serving a generic audience. With it, the platform is serving individual fans.
Ryland Reed is Co-Founder and CEO of Videostream Interactive Partners. He has 25+ years of experience in media technology, including launching the first known FAST platform at CoolCast in 1999 and scaling ad distribution technology at DG Systems. He holds 7 patents across 17 filings, including interactive TV technology used by NBC, CBS, FOX, and Univision.
Published August 30, 2026 by Videostream Interactive Partners.