Here’s how SportVot is giving every athlete globally, the limelight they deserve.

• ByStartupStory     |    September 10, 2021

“Not just International cricket and IPL, every game requires importance, ” says Shubangi Gupta, CMO SportVot in an interview with Startup Story

Educational background

Shubhangi comes from a marketing background. She used to work in Digital Marketing agencies, before she made her own agency. She then handed over the company to her friends before joining SportVot. She also manages her own online handicraft boutique called EthKnits. CEO of SportVot is Sidhhant Aggarwal, he comes from a tech background and carries 8 years of experience in this sector. Prior to SportVot, he had his own fantasy gaming platform, and also worked for Nazara Technologies, Yash Bhagwatkar, COO of SportVot, he looks after operations at SportVot. He also comes from an engineering background.

About Sportvot

SportVot is a multi-sports OTT platform providing cost effective live coverage and data solutions to sport organizations, clubs and tournament organizers. They are like ESPN for tier 2 and tier 3 sports, allowing these sports (eg, local cricket or Basketball) to stream matches and commercialize viewership. SportVot is simple and easy to use for any sports organisation, no matter how big or small. Their cloud based virtual studio provides readymade streaming tools which can support your organisation to produce quality interactive broadcasts with digital scorecards, player profiles, commentary and instant highlights. SportVot facilitates this end-to-end process. Since its launch in 2019, SportVot has streamed over 8500 games to more than 10 million viewers. And also made our mark in Australia, Dubai & the UK.

Founding Sportvot and connecting to people

Yash and Sidhhant are huge sports fanatics, and they had a YouTube channel where they did performance analysis of cricketers. They started developing more content and Shubhangi helped them with marketing. A few months into their journey, they realised that at the International level, the coverage is huge. However, when it comes to lower level tournaments, players lack access to such tools and opportunities. There are so many talented players at the grassroots level, but they cannot get their deserving opportunity, because there is no channel for promotion.

“Access to the right set of tools for performance development is a problem in the grassroots,” explains Shubhangi. They don’t have affordable tools to analyze their performance data. And the coverage at lower tier sports are fragmented. SportVot identified this problem and started their journey by covering the Mumbai DSO Games – District School competitions. They got tremendous viewership and overwhelming response from the friends, families, and peers of these. “When you broadcast any games, it involves complicated and expensive setups. So we decided to develop a game changing technology that helps any person in any corner of the world, broadcast their game with TV level scoring graphics, using their own smartphone,” Shubhangi shares. With this technology, they didn’t just make broadcasting affordable and accessible, but also gave every athlete and sporting bodies the tools to track every athlete’s performance. They are currently the market leaders in Kabaddi. In addition to that, they have covered more than 20 different sports on their multi-sports OTT platform.

With their robust technology, they have managed to cover more than 8500 games and profiled more than 50,000 athletes on SportVot. Be it any school/ university games, community games, practice games or District/ State/ National level games, SportVot intends to cover every single game globally. Today, a game can be streamed on SportVot through four different camera angles, add premium statistical graphics and distribute to a huge audience globally, all via a common platform. You can now watch & support your favorite athlete from your city on SportVot. They have also partnered with JIO to take every game to 150 MN+ JIO devices in the country. You can now watch every SportVot’s Live games on JIO Set-Top boxes, JIO phones and JIO TV.

Name Game

“In India people often informally rhyme words, like Namak – Shamak, so we aimed for keeping something so simple, that it becomes easy for everyone to remember. And in the future if we want to cover something beyond sports that would also become relatable,” explains Shubhangi.

Future Plan

SportVot is currently functional in four countries, so in the future they want to cover as many countries as possible, and also cover most games across a variety of sports.

Funding Status

Recently SportVot was selected by one of the top 10 accelerator programmes globally, called Startupbootcamp Australia. They have also received funding from friends and family. They are now open for Seed round.

Pandemic

“We did hit a wall when Pandemic, but we utilized the time building a community, we engaged with the community, so we grew more during the Pandemic as we spent more time interacting with the fans and athletes,” Shubhangi says. Then when lockdown eased a bit, they got back to field covering tournaments.

During the second wave, they covered more sports in Australia and the UK and UAE as well.

Problems faced

Mindset of people stood to be a problem for the founders. That needed some time to change. When they cover cities, the internet facility is great, but in smaller towns it got difficult to live stream. But slowly, everyone started to understand the importance of the tech to help every athlete grow.

Team

There are around 14 team members in SportVot

Inspiration

“Most important part of entrepreneurship is maintaining a network, because that is your asset. Also, your core team is very crucial, and they should be your priority always,” Shubhangi Gupta, CMO SportVot.

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