New technology from startup ventures is transforming the sports industry. The mission of this series will be to introduce startup companies in the sports technology space to a broader audience and allow Founders of promising new ventures to tell their story. Feel free to contact us if you know of a startup that should be considered for this series.
Company: Vodience
CEO: Koby Maluk
Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel
1. What is your elevator pitch?
Vodience adds a graphic virtual audience component to existing apps and content sites, by implementing a mass-crowd visualization technology, which reflects, in real-time, online and television viewers and their reactions while they are consuming digital content (mostly live sport broadcasts and/or text articles).
The virtual audience concept is achieved by letting each viewer choose a virtual identity that will represent him in the audience, with which he can make human animated gestures, post messages, navigate through the crowd’s sections, and determine his own crowd view.
Vodience’s concept results in a highly interactive live-audience experience, which dramatically increases the viewer’s’ consumption time and engagement level.
The Vodience arena can be fully branded, so publishers can sell it to advertisers and sponsors as a super-interactive real-estate, and thus enjoying new sources of revenue streams.
On the other hand, brands use the Vodience “arena” as a creative and yet very efficient advertising platform, which prolongs the viewer’s brand exposure time and generates very high (up to 3-times) CTR and direct sales ratio.
2. Problem & Solution
Problem #1: Current supportive apps still very much rely on chat and voting widgets.
Problem #2: The potential in the huge audience number that watches live events stays not utilized. The viewers cannot “feel” the massive number of audience that watches the show with them and there is no method of sensing the overall viewers’ state-of-mind and energy.
Problem #3: Developing content supportive apps is expensive with poor ROI, while using Facebook and Twitter leaves the broadcasters and publishers with very poor revenues and customization options.
Solution: The virtual audience disrupts the old chat and voting UX offering by letting the TV/web viewers to feel as if they are in a virtual stadium with millions of users sitting next to them.
Vodience is a white label social add-on that can be easily integrated in the publisher’s existing interactive platform and generates new revenue streams for the broadcasters, as a premium advertising real-estate.
Thus, the content owners enjoy both an innovative and immersive experience for their users, and a great creative tool which generated revenues with no investment on their side.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
Vodience turns to any sport content publisher that is interested in increasing its users’ engagement and interaction level. Vodience best value proposition would be for ad-based businesses such as web publishers and TV broadcasters, but can also fit to TV operators (running on their STB and 2nd screen apps).
The overall market would be the online advertising and pay TV market.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
Vodience shares the advertising revenues generated from the virtual stadium real estate. For subscription-based figures such as TV operators, Vodience charges per logged-in user.
5. Management Team – with titles
Koby Maluk, CEO
Glad Hemi, CTO
6. What else do you want the audience to know about your venture?
Two things:
- Since Vodience stores all the activity of the audience (any login, logout, gesture, message etc…), it can provide the publishers with a vital database on the viewers, such as retention rate, gender and age segmentation, audience behavior patterns etc…
- Ambitious broadcasters/publishers can use the virtual audience not just for accompanying their sport content but also to create new web and TV content formats in which the virtual audience will take active part in the show and influence the content flow (like letting the virtual audience to decide)
Bonus Question: If you could go to any sporting event, what would it be and why?
Probably a Barcelona vs. Real-Madrid Classico. Because the traditional rivalry, history and political gaps between the clubs – pushes the player to be the most competitive, committed and passionate for the win (and in most cases with no deterioration to violence). And of course, because both teams play great football.