With more than 2.2 million sports fans in the UK professing to watch live sports at a pub at least once a week, it’s safe to say this activity provides an enormous source of revenue for drinking establishments. And so it follows that successful bars and pubs are enormous sources of revenue for sports providers.

With this in mind, the UK sports provider Sky Sports created the Sky Sports Pub Challenge, an app that seeks to, according to Damien Saunders, business development director for Sky Business, “try and help the [pub owners] who take out our Sky products” by combining two of the most popular bar-related activities into one digital experience: sports-watching and pub-quizzing.

Billed as “the first bespoke app for football fans,” Sky Sports Pub Challenge is currently centered on the Premier League season, with the possibility of incorporating other sports on the horizon. Users can match wits against fellow football fans through polls, predictions and trivia questions culled from games before, during and after. Players receive points for correctly answered questions, which they can accumulate throughout the season for monthly prizes of £2,500 and a grand end-of-season prize of £20,000. Bars and pubs are encouraged to provide their own site-specific prizes as well.

As games progress, a team of Sky “games masters” supplies the content in real-time, ensuring it is based on what is actually happening at any given moment. Saunders said it was important for the content “to be dynamic because the ebb and flow of the games can be so different. Some are really exciting and you don’t want your phone to get in the way of your experience of the game. Other games are dry and then you want quite a lot of engagement with the games master.” Part of the fun, said Saunders, is getting to know the different games masters: “It’s a bit like when you go into the pub and you’ve got one of those friends that knows loads of trivia. That’s the kind of role our guys are playing. You actually build up a bit of a report with the games master. They have different personalities and characters.”

With a heavy focus on pre- and post-game content, Saunders hopes the app will “get customers into the pubs and bars earlier and broaden out the duration of the game.” To that end, the app provides the user with a list of the nearest pubs featuring Sky Sports and directions for how to get there. Cleverly, its quizzing and scorekeeping functions don’t kick in until the player has actually entered the business and checked in, ensuring a direct correlation between usage and drinkage.

“[Pub owners] want more people to come, want them to come back more frequently and want them to spend more,” said Saunders. “[They] have a very simple business model. The more food and drinks they sell, the more money they make.”

And the more they subscribe to Sky Sports.

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