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BBC’s My Sport update for iOS and Android lets you personalise news feeds

BBC Sport for iOS and Android will soon let you tweak the news feed so that your favourite teams and sports appear at the top. 

Rolling out in phases this week, the new customisable BBC Sport apps will let you create a personal My Sport home page where you can choose which sports and teams take centre stage. 

This personalised view will sit separately to the current, curated home page where news stories are prioritised by the BBC Sport team. 

Related: BBC reveals iPlayer plans – 30 day catch up, radio playlists, 4K streaming and How can I watch the 2015 Rugby World Cup?Neil Hall, Head of Sport Product, BBC Digital told Recombu how the new service worked in a nutshell. 

“Say you wanted to go big on, say, Welsh sport. You’d drag this section to the top of the list. What that does, is it impacts the order in the navigation, which is really useful for users. We’ve created this new destination which reflects the best of our content on the topics [viewers] have told us they care about.”

From this week, you’ll be able to create a curated view taking in all of the English and Scottish Premier League teams as well as  50 sports from Formula 1 to tennis, from women’s football to snooker, plus you can follow all the news from your football, cricket and rugby teams, the home nations and football leagues. 

MySport will change over time as well, bringing in more data and it’ll also change to cater for big events like the FA Cup and Olympics. BBC Sport users will be able to drill down on group stages and individual events as well as follow teams and nations. 

Hall added: “We know keeping up to speed with what’s going on in the world of sport is really important to sports fans – and increasingly on mobile devices. 

“Today marks an important step towards making that experience personal and tailored to each sport fan out there with the BBC Sport app. 

“We are really looking forward to seeing the reaction from fans over the coming months and creating a truly personal Sport service for everyone.”

The BBC says that three million customers use the mobile apps every week, which have now been downloaded over seven million times. 

The idea is that over time, the My Sport feature will roll out across the BBC Sport website and BBC Sport apps on other platforms, including games consoles and smart TVs. With a BBC ID, viewers will be able to log in and take their recommendations with them across platforms. 

One reason for rolling My Sport out to mobiles before other platforms is their near omnipresence; we more or less always have them to hand and sports fans tend to use them to keep an eye on scores and match updates over the weekends. 

Hall also said that part of the reason for targeting mobile customers first was due to the more personal nature of the devices; getting personalised recommendations right for TV apps – where more than one person could be watching – will take some time to get working properly. 

That said, the jury’s still out on when we’ll see the My Sport feature hitting the Windows Phone version of BBC Sport

As well as this, the BBC has also announced that in the coming weeks, users of the BBC News apps will be able to tailor and sync the My News section of the app across mutliple devices and platfoms.

Eventually, all BBC content, whether that’s recommended iPlayer shows, news feeds or followed football teams will have the ability to be synced under one BBC ID per user, allowing for a more bespoke BBC experience. 

Last year, the BBC updated iPlayer so that it had a more uniform look across multiple devices, making it easier to search for content thanks to increased familiarity. 

Check out the video below for a better idea of how My Sport will look and work on the BBC Sport mobile apps. 

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