DALLAS – In a controversial move announced today, Active.com has decided to add subscription fees to the latest upgrade of its mobile swimming results application Meet Mobile.
While Active also announced plenty of other upgrades, the most notable information in its upgrade announcement is that Active would begin charging a subscription fee for access to both its archived and live meet results.
The cost of this subscription is planned to be $1.99 per month or $5.99 per year.
This is a major breakaway from where most mainstream sports currently reside within the Internet ecosphere. Every single other mainstream and/or major sport provides open and free access to the most basic levels of results access. While stats-heavy sports like Major League Baseball have entities that charge for access to higher-level data produced by sabermetrics-like content, none of them charge for the most basic information like who won and how a team scored.
With Active and Hy-Tek largely owning the market on swimming results within the United States and Australia, it will become that much more difficult for the general public to access basic results content, especially considering that meet managers have continued to rely more and more on Meet Mobile as their sole live results location.
What is yet to be determined is whether or not media outlets will have easy access to results for reporting. For a niche sport to shut out media access would be a major setback for the entire industry. Results form the basis for event competition reporting and subsequent related stories. Those stories rely on results and advertisers rely on those stories to populate their ads. Access to results is the cornerstone of our sport.
Currently, Meet Mobile does have some in-app purchases that including heat sheets to be purchased at events.
The new upgrade does look to be an advancement in how user-friendly Meet Mobile can be when it does come to results content, including the long-desired ability to search for a swimmer from the home screen instead of having to find the meet first. But, users are definitely going to have to pay for the experience.
Meet Mobile Full Announcement
As we continue our investment in the swimming market following the release of ACTIVE Hy-Tek’s Swim Manager, we’d like to announce that Meet Mobile is about to get a much needed upgrade. Meet Mobile works with Meet Manager to provide your participants and their fans event information and real-time meet results.
The update is going to feature a complete visual redesign and dramatic improvements to functionality like:
· Searching meets by swimmer name or by GPS location
· Following swimmers across a season instead of by event
· Sharing the meet experience on social mediaWhen this upgrade goes live, fans may realize that they no longer have access to meet results on older versions of Meet Mobile. If that happens, they simply need to upgrade their application and choose from a monthly or yearly subscription plan to reactivate results.
Reactivation is all done inside the application, so you don’t have to do anything. Just encourage users to upgrade; Meet Mobile will take care of the rest through an in-app purchase.
If you have additional questions about the Meet Mobile upgrade, feel free to email support at support@hy-tekltd.com.
Best Regards,
The ACTIVE Hy-Tek Team
I think this is a big step back for swimming. It will difficult the access to swimming results to the major public. It is very unpopular decision. I hope they think better. For the best of swimming.
this is so wrong. Swimming as a sport is in bad enough shape as it is without impediments into getting results. As a journalist I use MM to analyse results. I`ll think twice about covering swimming if I have to pay for MM.
Deck Pass also has results, by meet, very similar to the current Meet Mobile. I doubt I will pay that upgrade fee, and will rely more on USA Swimming’s app!
Exactly! I hope more people feel like this. I personally do not need such immediate gratification for a price. I will watch the meet, pay attention to the result board and wait for Deck Pass. Swimming has always struggled to be a mainstream sport until we get superstars like Phelps, Ladecky, Franklin; it is sad that such a successful app will now charge….bad, bad, bad decision! I will delete the app before I upgrade. It’s possible that they may force everyone’s hand to upgrade…not allowing results unless it is upgraded-they do control access!
I do plan on deleting my MM app as well. Unfortunately, Active.com provides the results that are posted to Deck Pass, so that access may change as well. Their message says that they’ve made these changes “Due to feedback….”, but I doubt anyone wrote and asked to pay for this service. Some of the new features might be worthy of a small fee, but not meet results!
It’s 6 bucks a year…..MM has to pay the rent as well…
I would gladly pay $6/year if that means that the Active ads stop popping up.
The $6 annual charge is pretty minimal. It’s a lot less than you can spent on a pair of goggles that probably won’t last you one year, and almost anything else costs a lot more than that. I suspect that it’s also less than the cost of each practice if you divided swim team annual or season fees down by the number of practice you or your child attends.