Nobody wants a second screen. They want a better first one.

A decade of companion apps has produced almost nothing anybody uses, because the whole idea starts from a misreading of what a viewer is doing.

Companion apps have been the great white whale of sports broadcasting. Every few years a network launches one, promotes it heavily during a marquee fixture, reports encouraging download figures, and quietly lets it rot.

The pitch is always the same. Watch the match on your television while the app gives you live stats, alternate angles, polls and a chat. It sounds sensible. It fails because it misunderstands what people are doing with the phone in their hand, which is not engaging with a second layer of the broadcast. They are messaging a friend about the match, or checking a fantasy team, or looking at something entirely unrelated during a stoppage.

The companion app is competing with a group chat, and the group chat wins every single time, because the group chat contains people the viewer likes.

There is also a physical problem nobody wants to state plainly. Looking down at a phone means not looking at the pitch. Sport is the one form of television where missing four seconds can mean missing the entire point of the evening. Every glance at a companion app is a small gamble, and viewers work that out fast.

Where second screens do work is where they replace the broadcast rather than supplement it. Fantasy and prediction games get real usage because they have their own reason to exist and their own rhythm. Live scores on a wrist do well because a glance costs nothing. A whip-around scores app during a final day of a season is genuinely great, and notably it does not ask you to look at the same match you are watching.

So the money would be better spent on the primary screen. Better graphics that appear when they are relevant and disappear when they are not. The tactical camera. Referee audio. A replay system that shows the incident from the angle that actually settles it rather than the one that happens to be cued.

Put another way, a viewer opening a companion app is usually telling you the broadcast is not enough. The fix is upstream of the app.