As Google Play’s global head of media apps business development for most of this decade, Serge Kassardjian saw the growing fragmentation of the digital video marketplace. Social channels such as Facebook, Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube all had video platforms. Instagram and Snapchat had short-term media offerings.
Then, last June, Instagram added its own IGTV for longer form videos. Kassardjian called that his “aha” moment. Associates in media began telling him, “We don’t know what to do with Instagram TV. We’re just getting used to publishing somewhat professional content in Stories, and now we have to figure out Instagram TV and then we have to do Facebook TV and then we have to do YouTube and all these different places.”
This led Kassardjian to team with Randy Jimenez to create StayTuned Digital, a machine learning-based publisher that will automate the process of optimizing content for each platform. The start-up is conducting a closed beta trial during the first half of 2019, with the expectation of a public launch later in the year.
“At the end of the day, these were the same content creators,” Kassardjian, StayTuned’s CEO, said. “They wanted to create video, and they wanted to distribute it. But just distributing across all of the endpoints and the fragmentation of the endpoints—both from a formatting and optimization perspective as well as a technology and integration perspective—just became very, very challenging.”
The abundance and the importance of sports content is an early focus, as evidenced by the company’s investors. Bowery Capital led a $2.5 million funding round with support from CourtsideVC, the fund backed by Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, and Liquid 2 Ventures, where 49ers legend Joe Montana is a partner.
Sports broadcast rights have become prized commodities, and there is content being created across the spectrum by media companies, leagues, teams, and athletes. Kassardjian said sports are “a sweet spot” for StayTuned Digital, given the demand and the varying formats: bite-sized highlights, 5-to-10 minute video shorts, and live streams. (Live video will not be available immediately but is part of the product roadmap.)
“Sports, right now, has more content than anyone,” he said, noting that content includes “every single touchpoint” as fans consume sports on multiple devices.
StayTuned has added Christine Pantoya as an advisor. Until October, she was an NBA SVP and the league’s global head of mobile and direct-to-consumer products. Jimenez is now a CTO for the fourth time, having previously worked at SinglePlatform, Tiki Barber’s Thuzio, and Ollie, a pet food subscription service.
Kassardjian calls the company’s core system “OPM” for optimize, publish, and measure. While some human help will be needed early to teach the machine, StayTuned will soon automate the process whereby a user uploads a video, and the algorithm will optimize across all destinations, then publish simultaneously, and measure the performance of each video to continue refining the process. Even among the biggest tech companies are often multiple destinations: Google, (YouTube, Google Play), Amazon (Twitch, Channels), Microsoft (LinkedIn), Facebook (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger), Snapchat, Pinterest, Apple, and Twitter.
“I had just felt one part of the pain point, which was the fragmentation across the Google devices and Google channels, but imagine going against eight other tech companies just in the U.S. only,” Kassardjian said. “And then, on top of that, these companies are constantly introducing new things and new features and who knows what they’re going to continue to create. This just seemed like the perfect time to start a company around distribution.”
StayTuned will be based in the Grand Central Tech Startup-in-Residence Program in NYC this year.