Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
Shubhangi Gupta: In India, there are approximately 10 million aspiring/emerging athletes (U-19), and around 100k + semi-professional/ professional tournaments that take place annually. But, most athletes do not get access to the right set of tools and platforms to showcase their talent. This results in a lack of transparency in talent discovery which in turn increases the number of dropouts in the Indian Sports Ecosystem. About 99% of the sports games in the world are not live-streamed or telecast across any platform. Sports streaming is expensive, complicated. A traditional broadcasting setup involves dependency on external service providers for expensive hardware, multiple complicated software and apps, and a special arrangement for OB vans. SportVot has been strategically designed to provide cost-efficient & robust technology to sports bodies & tournament organizers to stream their games online without going heavy on their pockets.
We discovered this problem when we were working for a Cricket Analysis show called The Free Hit Project. Sidhhant Agarwal (CEO) and Yash Bhagwatakar (COO) used to interact with aspiring cricketers of the country and saw the need for more sports coverage & player analytics beyond the regular International Football and Cricket leagues. That was the beginning of the idea of our core product and vision of the company. To create a technology to cater to the grassroots sports. And, we kick-started our journey by covering the DSO games in Mumbai, wherein we streamed inter school games and received an overwhelming response from the community, including schools, parents, etc.
Great Companies: What are the various Services provided by SportVot
Shubhangi Gupta: SportVot is a multisport OTT platform where you can watch grassroots and community sports matches, highlights and catch emerging athletes in action. We provide a cost effective and convenient way for sports bodies and tournament organisers to broadcast their games, connect with their local community and earn money from viewership and advertisements. SportVot is simple and easy to use for any sports organisation, no matter how big or small. Going live with Sportvot is super quick, you don’t have to buy any specific hardware, we can get you up and running within a few hours. The SportVot cloud suite helps to provide an ESPN type experience with premium TV grade graphics and interactive live streaming. All this is done, with the only piece of hardware we all possess i.e the smartphone.
Great Companies: What makes SportVot different from hundreds of other Sports Tech Firms?
Shubhangi Gupta:
The biggest advantage of SportVot is speed and convenience. SportVot’s cloud suite is hardware agnostic, one can connect either a smartphone or any type of internet-enabled camera, camcorders and start producing TV-quality live streams. The real problem in sports streaming is the access to coverage and the ease of setting up the streaming infrastructure quickly and without any significant upfront investment. We focus on minimizing the cost of setting up, providing the end to end service and simplifying the video capture first which is the biggest reason behind 99% of the games not being telecast.
Great Companies: What are the struggles and challenges you face?
Shubhangi Gupta: Figuring out the camera set up for live streaming at low cost was a challenge. Not every tournament organizer can afford expensive set up and a lot of our time went in research and development for the right set of tools required to make this process cheap and easy. With our SportVot Cloud Studio, we make it cost-efficient and easy for every sporting body to broadcast their games.
Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line look like for SportVot?
Shubhangi Gupta: In 18 months we have managed to build our presence in local areas of India, Australia, UK, and UAE by covering 8500+ games across 56 different sports, profiling 40,000+ athletes, and building a strong community of more than a million sports enthusiasts on our digital channels. This passionate sports community of tier -2, tier-3 and rural areas helps us to get more brand sponsorships which in turn assist these unique sports talent, and even tournaments, to get more support and visibility
There are around 25m athletes and 250k+ tournaments worth streaming in India & Australia alone, we want to grow in more geographies and unearth more hidden talent.
Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
Shubhangi Gupta: Believe in your idea, keep networking, and invest more time and energy in your key resources. Your core team is your crucial asset.