Team Stream for iPhone and iPad

12.05.2012
Sports fans have it easy nowadays. We have team blogs, websites, Twitter feeds and up-to-the-minute video clips on demand. Yet for all these conveniences, fans still have to do the legwork of subscribing to feeds or following the tweets of players or beat writers. The and apps from aim to make it easier for fans to find and follow content on their favorite teams.

Despite its association with Bleacher Report sports site, the Team Stream app contains news and updates from a variety of sources across the blogosphere. These sources include select team-centric blogs as well as the Twitter feeds of star players and beat writers from your favorite team. While the focus is on Bleacher Report content, it is nice to see other sources featured as well.

While Team Stream includes these additional sources, the apps stop short of offering a true stream of team news due to a lack of customization. There's no way to add additional blogs, for example, or Twitter feeds, for that matter. You cannot remove content, either. It's a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.

Team Stream and Team Stream HD offer one click, "set it and forget it" updates on your favorite teams and national stories. Both apps offer breaking news and score update notifications. In testing, I often learned of breaking news through these notifications, often times only seconds after the news appeared on Twitter. The notification settings alone are arguably the most useful feature of the Team Stream apps.

The Team Stream and Team Stream HD apps are virtually identical except for the way that the HD iPad version displays larger pictures with headlines in the stream. The apps are so similar, in fact, that I wonder why Bleacher Report didn't just release a single universal app for both platforms. Nevertheless, the layouts and user experience remain similar on both the iPhone and the iPad.