SPORTS! SPORTS! SPORTS!
Here’s something for all you lovers of organised physical activity or merely watching it out there: HQ Trivia, the daily live trivia show that debuted to such wild popularity it boosted host Scott Rogowsky to fame before briefly inspiring dystopian alarmism and apocalyptic fan fiction, is branching out into sports.
HQ Sports now has a schedule! See you every Tuesday and Friday at 10p ET ???? pic.twitter.com/FUGKYCvOaz
— HQ Sports (@hqsports) June 28, 2018
Per a report in VentureBeat, HQ Trivia has launched HQ Sports, which is hosted by fantasy football web show OFFSIDES host and Skechers spokesperson Lauren Gambino. It streams via the same app and already has acquired an audience that is reportedly in the hundreds of thousands, though unlike the main HQ show, it only airs twice a week. VentureBeat writes:
https://twitter.com/lauren_gambino?lang=en
One new trick, HQ Trivia CEO, co-founder, and occasional Rogowsky tormentor Rus Yusupov told the site, that the app is rolling out is are experimental formats. That includes a sort of sudden-death mode being tried out on Sundays where the hosts ask continual questions until a single winner emerges.
It’s unsurprising that HQ is trying to reach other demographics, and sports is an obvious choice, considering that there are millions of fans obsessed with sport stats, history, and random minutiae like, uh, mascots. (I don’t know a lot about sports.) For one, while the app’s original launch was meteoric, HQ runs the risk of petering out after having received millions of dollars in high-profile investments. Yusupov told VentureBeat that there were considering launching other versions of the app targeted at movie or tech fans, which could — like sports — open up the floodgates for all kinds of guest hosting opportunities.
In the meantime, HQ Trivia is facing a barrage of other competition. On the music front, teen-focused app Musical.ly was reportedly planning its own copycat app earlier this year, and rival The Q has already scored a number of branded partnerships with sports teams and media enterprises like “Dallas Mavericks, Fox Sports, MLB and NCAA basketball,” per Digiday. Perhaps more ominously, Facebook recently announced a number of tools designed to allow content creators to generate their own quiz shows, though it’s not clear people actually want that kind of thing clogging up their feed as opposed to a dedicated app.
Speaking personally, the trivia-app fad has already kind of started to wear out its welcome, though I’m all ears if someone wants to start offering Yeast Kens as prizes.