Name: Shubhangi Gupta
Business Name: SportVot
Location: Mumbai, India
Establishment (Year): 2019
Category/Industry: Advertising & Marketing
Profession/ Specialty: Marketing
Company details:
SportVot is a platform that provides an online channel to live stream sports games and help discover sports talent from the grassroots of India. Over 99% of the sports matches in the world (not just India) have no form of digital/live coverage. 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. This makes the digitization of local games very difficult and hence has no visibility to local talent. There is a need for a cost-effective streaming platform that undertakes the needs of teams, franchises, and fans. SportVot enables streaming with the least amount of resources and has a rich layer of tools overlay to edit, analyse, and share the videos across various channels. SportVot has streamed over 25,000 sports matches so far, has featured over 135,000 athletes and has over 50M in viewership. The aim is to eventually become an end-to-end digital + physical sports platform providing athletes with better visibility and opportunities and creating a talent pathway that helps them take the next step in their careers.
Unique selling proposition/ competitive advantage:
The EU platforms in our space and quite a few scattered channels on Youtube have shown the demand for local sports content consumption. But the biggest challenge today is still to make broadcasting/streaming cost effective and accessible. There is already an "outside broadcast" economy existing in countries like India, Aus. Especially in in India a lot of cable operators whose businesses have now gone bust (thanks to Jio) are now venturing out into alternative businesses. With mobile internet data rates in India being at an all-time low, these operators have now resorted to youtube broadcasting as an option. There are a couple of challenges here: Discovery & generating revenue out of youtube is challenging Youtube or Facebook weren't meant for primarily streaming sports, which requires interactive scorecards, multiple video mixing, and other nuances related to a quality broadcast. This leads to them using expensive software and hardware. SportVot partners and empowers these operators with the right tools and technology that have been developed in-house to ease their operations also create a brand for themselves and generate that added revenue out from the viewership. What both of them do is just provide the platform but not the end-to-end service (which in most cases is the issue in India) also they are neglecting major stakeholders of the ecosystem in the form of these operators/local operators. This is what we believe is going to help us scale better.
Challenges faced during the journey:
The most difficult challenge was to scale. Acquiring mass sports properties across different cities of India has been a difficult journey. Although, our strategy of making the broadcasting setup so easy that even a young student can broadcast any game - to acquiring multiple local YouTube broadcasters by offering our broadcasting tech for free to exclusively stream on our platform, made us reach where we are standing today.
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