This week, Yanni and Andy chat with Suzanne Kirkland about how the company uses AI to separate audio into its “stems” or component parts, giving organisations more control over their audio and video assets. In sports, that means tweaking levels or replacing unwanted sounds to make content libraries more usable. But the tech, which was born out of a love for homemade karaoke, also has powerful applications across TV, film and the music industry.

Timestamps:

• 08:30 – Intro to AudioShake

In this week’s episode of the Sports Loft Podcast, Yanni and Charlie sit down with Shubh Jagani, head of enterprise solutions at OpusClip, the AI startup that can turn long-form videos into viral clips with just one click. 

Today, every organisation – from sports teams to media giants – needs a constant stream of engaging social media content. OpusClip makes that possible, helping clients like VoxMedia, Seattle Seahawks, FloSports, Memphis Grizzlies and Juventus to transform their video libraries into shareable clips, to engage their existing audiences and find new fans.

Over the course of the conversation, we cover the companies inception and growth, its relevancy to the sports and entertainment industry, and the company's new product, ClipAnything – which allows users to effortlessly generate specific moments from any video using natural language prompts.

On this episode of the Sports Loft Podcast, hosts Yanni and Charlie sit down with Antyush Bollini, COO and co-founder of OneCourt, a groundbreaking company making sports more inclusive for fans who are blind or visually impaired.

OneCourt has developed a haptic device that allows fans to feel live action through trackable vibrations, revolutionising the way sports are experienced. The company, spun out of the University of Washington, recently partnered with T-Mobile and Major League Baseball to showcase their innovation at the MLB All-Star Game and are on the verge of launching a new device with improved features.

There's also an angel round underway, with the likes of Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, heading up the cap table.

Timestamps:

In this episode, the Charlie and Yanni chat with Bob Thomson, the founder of Storyteller, a company that enables brands to integrate vertical video stories into their apps and websites.

They discuss the rise of vertical video formats like Stories and Reels, the power of narrative in sports, and how Storyteller helps sports teams and rights holders deliver engaging content to fans. Storyteller is a platform that helps clients create and deliver vertical content in a compelling and personalised way. Clients, such as the LA Rams and FC Barcelona, have seen positive results in terms of increased engagement and video views after implementing Storyteller. The platform also offers opportunities for commercialisation, including sponsored content and full-screen ads. 

In this episode, Yanni and Charlie chat with Kamal Mistry, CEO of Arcturus, a company specialising in volumetric video – which allows for the capture and display of three-dimensional spaces and objects.

We were blown away by Arcturus' demo at the Sports Loft Summit, which put the viewer in the middle of a wrestling match. So we've been keen to delve further into the origins of Arcturus, the concept of volumetric video, and how the technology is being used by its sports and entertainment clients.

Kamal explains how Arcturus provides tools and services for creating and manipulating volumetric video content, which can be viewed on 2D displays, as well as VR/AR headsets, such as the Apple Vision Pro, Meta Quest, and Microsoft HoloLens. The conversation also covers current capabilities, future developments and the crucial discussions around rights deals.

Timestamps:

• 06:25 – What Arcturus does

This week Yanni and Charlie sit down with Vince Ircandia, CEO and founder of Stellar Algo, a company transforming how sports organisations understand and engage with their fans, using data analytics. Vince explains how Stellar Algo unifies fan data from diverse sources – including venues, e-commerce, social media and marketing channels – into a single, actionable view, and shares his journey from working with teams like LA Galaxy and LA Kings to founding Stellar Algo.

"The relationship you have with the fan is becoming more central, regardless of the revenue streams you're trying to drive," Vince explains. "Our platform makes it easy to identify fan insights and opportunities, and we put those at your fingertips."

He also highlights how their platform empowers teams to identify fan insights and personalise content, with the goal of improving fan engagement and revenue growth. And we dig into how one NHL team effectively targeted 30,000 fans for a Toyota campaign, resulting in significant engagement and sales, showcasing the tangible impact of data-driven marketing.

In this episode, Yanni and Charlie chat with Maninder Saini, head of growth at Twelve Labs, a company that uses multimodal AI to bring human-like understanding to video content. We had Twelve Labs on stage at the Sports Loft Summit, so in this conversation we dig deeper into the applications of this technology in the sports and media entertainment industry, particularly in helping rights holders organise and find content in their video libraries.

Up front, Maninder explains what multimodal AI is and why it's the perfect tool for understanding the content and context in video. We also cover the evolution of Twelve Labs, its recent $50M Series A funding and the challenges and opportunities in the market.

We think Twelve Labs is an exciting proposition for sports and entertainment organisations with large (or even unwieldy) content libraries because there are so many potential use cases. A broadcaster might use it to tag and organise incoming match footage to share with relevant commercial partners. A team might use it to help its video editors quickly assemble highlight reels and social content. A brand might use it to scour historical footage for advertising material – showing how they’ve been the key differentiator at crucial moments through the decades. And that's just scratching the surface.

“My view is that it can make a video editor into a bionic editor,” says Maninder. “They can do so much more with Twelve Labs. Most of the teams, at the club and league level, are often quite lean and very scarcely resourced. So this technology will enable them to do all of the things on their backlog and their to-do list that they never really get around to because they're just overburdened with the volume of day-to-day tasks.”

Timestamps:

This week’s guest on the Sports Loft Podcast is Michael Proman, managing director of Scrum Ventures – a seed stage investment platform that counts large Japanese corporations among its investor base, and uses that network to grow its investments and help them break into Asia.

Founded by Japanese serial entrepreneur Tak Miyata in 2013, Scrum began life as a generalist VC firm, “investing in pretty much anything under the sun,” says Michael. That all changed in the lead-up to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, when Scrum’s investors – including the likes of Panasonic, Fujitsu and Mizuno – became interested in the opportunities around in sports, media and entertainment.

Now, the remit is to find companies that “transcend the vertical” – those that relate to sports, health or entertainment, but might have a total addressable market (TAM) beyond those definitions.

“If I look at the first dozen investments we've made,” says Michael. “A lot are either outside of sports, change the definition of sports and entertainment, or show the evolution of what sports and entertainment means in a 2024 perspective.”

Timestamps:

• 01:23 – Introducing Scrum Ventures

On Wednesday May 8th, we held the Sports Loft Showcase 2024, where we featured twelve incredible tech companies that we believe the industry needs to know about.

In this second episode of our two-parter on the event, Charlie, Andy and our MC for the day, Yanni, look back at the Summit and discuss the presentations from the companies that can broadly be defined as operating in the content and immersive spaces.

They are:

• Twelve Labs

And if you missed part one, make sure to check it out. In that episode, we dig into the companies that presented in our Fan Engagement sessions.

On Wednesday May 8th, we held the Sports Loft Showcase 2024, where we featured twelve incredible tech companies that we believe the industry needs to know about.

In this episode, Charlie, Andy and our MC for the day, Yanni, look back at the event and discuss the presentations from the companies that can broadly be defined as operating in the fan engagement space.

They are:

• Monterosa

In part two, we'll dig into the companies that presented in our Content and Immersive sessions.