Using the internet to access real-time statistics for elite-level basketball games has become a phenomenon in Australia over the summer season.

FIBA LiveStats is a real-time, courtside results and statistics package developed by SportingPulse that's used in Australia's top two basketball competitions, the NBL and the WNBL.

The number of people following NBL and WNBL games on their computer grew dramatically from last season, with huge increases when any of the clubs with big support played away from home.

During this year's NBL season basketball fans clicked on FIBA LiveStats on no fewer than 390,000 occasions and watched the games unfold through real-time box scores, play-by-play news feed, shot charts, scoring development graphs and individual player statistics.

While almost 9000 spectators attended Game 5 of the South Dragons and Melbourne Tigers Grand Final series, a further 5693 followed the game on FIBA LiveStats, setting a record for basketball in Australia.

FIBA LiveStats is also used for the majority of Australian basketball's senior state competitions, along with dozens of leagues around the world. In Australia, SEABL, Big V, Waratah SBL and QBL leagues will again use FIBA LiveStats for the winter season, resulting in millions of extra page impressions.

Since Round 2 of the NBL season last September, when the competition switched to the FIBA LiveStats product, more than 16.95 million page impressions were recorded. The WNBL completed its successful season last week night with 1.75 million page impressions.

FIBA LiveStats has been developed by award-winning software company SportingPulse and is part of the FIBA Organizer suite of products that is available free to all FIBA-affiliated basketball associations.

SportingPulse CEO Nick Maywald said: "The popularity of FIBA LiveStats on the NBL and WNBL websites is vindication of the quality of this real-time stats package and the online traffic at state level demonstrates the strength of grassroots basketball in Australia. SportingPulse is proud to be able to partner with FIBA to deliver a quality product for basketball associations to use and and supporters to enjoy for free."

FIBA LiveStats is just one of range of integrated sports software products available free to all FIBAaffiliated organisations. The sports management software FIBA Organizer was launched in November 2006 to provide SportingPulse's award-winning software, free of charge, to every organization in FIBA's 213 member national federations.

FIBA Organizer is capable of connecting every basketball player in the world and the launch of the French and Spanish versions has massively increased its global reach.