New technology from startup ventures is transforming the global sports industry. This Startup Series has introduced over 300 startup companies in the sports technology space to a broader audience by allowing Founders of promising new ventures to tell their story and pitch their idea. Feel free to submit your startup’s answers to the below questions or contact us if you know of a startup that should be considered for inclusion in this series.
This series is supported by Stadia Ventures. If you are a sports technology startup looking for strategic investors, we recommend checking out their upcoming accelerator programs.
Company name: Spalk
Founder(s): Ben Reynolds (CEO) & Michael Prendergast (CTO)
Headquarters: New York
Website: https://www.spalk.co
1. What is your elevator pitch?
Spalk is a plug-in for live-streaming video players that allows viewers to pick a commentator to suit their preferred language, style or team bias. Commentators can call games remotely from a laptop anywhere in the world and Spalk's plug-in ensures lip-sync perfect synchronization between their alternate audio and the livestream.We license Spalk to broadcasters and sports leagues and our partners regularly see 40%+ increases in their audience size and accompanying engagement metrics.
2. Problem & Solution
We partner with broadcasters, sports leagues & OTT providers to help them grow their audience and customise their live content at scale.Before Spalk, if a broadcaster wanted to offer multiple commentators, they would have had to bring all the commentators into a studio and produce a separate video stream for each commentator. With Spalk, commentators can be located anywhere in the world and broadcasters only need to produce a single video stream. Viewers simply pick the commentator they want.
As a recent example, FIBA used Spalk to power the commentary at the FIBA U19 World Basketball Championships and had over 90 commentators, in 5 langauges, commentating games for over 6 million basketball fans all around the world.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
Every year over $28bn is spent in North America alone on purchasing the rights to broadcast live sport, with the size of this investment, content owners are seeking out new ways to drive fan engagement and audience growth. Enter Spalk!There are huge opportunities in periphery markets of eSports, Government video & general entertainment content, but we want to focus on sports for now.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
We charge broadcasters $0.02 - $0.10 per viewer hour (e.g. 1 viewer watching for an hour or 3 viewers watching for 20 minutes) based on the number of viewers they have.This is a scale-able billing model and aligns incentives between ourselves and content owner.
5. Management Team – with titles
Ben Reynolds, CEO & Co-FounderMichael Prendergast, CTO & Co-Founder
6. Financial Needs: are you currently looking for investment? Have you raised investment already? If so, who are your investors?
We raised a small pre-seed round in Q1 2017 of $350k.We are about to go to market with our Seed raise and will be targeting a $1.5m raise from a mixture of institutional investors and relavent angels in the US and our home countries of Australia & New Zealand.