2. Oligopoly[0] just a few companies who deliver live results.
You would need a ton of cash upfront, to hire people who would watch the games and would press buttons in order to inform you about results so you could parse them and deliver live results which eventually would become a live API.
But as you can see, there are people involved in this, who watch all those games, if you can manage to automate this, without requiring too many people, you are a rich man.
Let's put in that way, almost everyone consumes their API if they are offline, we are offline.
At least some leagues already provide live feeds of scores and important plays. During NFL games I hang out on a certain irc channel and there's a bot that posts them.
They are also betting and why shouldn't they publish results that would let them win even if that's not the correct result ?
One could argue that the masses would always return the correct score but imagine 50 people debating about sports, there are 50 opinions and the truth somewhere in between.
And therefore those people also called 'scouts' must be trained in order to accomplish the job.
2. Oligopoly[0] just a few companies who deliver live results.
You would need a ton of cash upfront, to hire people who would watch the games and would press buttons in order to inform you about results so you could parse them and deliver live results which eventually would become a live API.
But as you can see, there are people involved in this, who watch all those games, if you can manage to automate this, without requiring too many people, you are a rich man.
Let's put in that way, almost everyone consumes their API if they are offline, we are offline.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly