Mobile Application as a Way to Draw Attention to Niche Kinds of Sport (on the Example of Mobile Application about Field Hockey)

Field hockey is one of the oldest kinds of sports. It is very popular in European countries today, it has even became a national sport in some countries. In Russia, however, constant attention to a field hockey has been paid for about 50 years, but it hasn't become widely popular sport during this time. This becomes a problem not only for an athletes and sports clubs, but also for the entire kind of sport. Due the low popularity, we won't see a lot of sponsors in this sport and events in field hockey don't often shows in the media. And this is affects on the fact, that the audience of a field hockey don't increase. This work is devoted to a problem of increasing of the field's hockey audience in the conditions of a lack of wide media interest. A mobile app seems to be one of the ways that can help to do it. In the first chapter we review a sports journalism, the stages of its development from traditional to multimedia technologies and come to the conclusion that today the mobile app has become an integral part of sports journalism. We can see it from the experience of many major sporting events. Also in this chapter we learn more about mobile apps: the process of purchasing, features, and types. In the second chapter we draw our attention to a field hockey: the features of this game, the rules, and the state of this sport in Russia. Next, we look at sports mobile apps: the specifics of their work, ways to interact with the audience, and the typical structure of such apps. After that, we go to the analysis of existing field hockey mobile app, divide them into the categories and consider a few examples in each of them. The third chapter is devoted to developing of the concept of a mobile app about field hockey. We describe the project and develop a prototype of a mobile app. In the future, it can become the basis for creating a real mobile app about Russian field hockey and be used by managers of sports clubs to inform fans and attract a new audience. The uniqueness of this project is that there are no similar analogues on the Russian mobile app market.