Sports streaming 101: Launching and scaling a sports platform

0:04Nick Meacham:Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the next episode of Streamtime Sports. My name is Chris Stone, the community lead, joined as always by our CEO. And today we also have a special guest, our friend, back for a second round on the show, Mr. David Guinan. David, special episode, as anyone can see now that it is a show, no longer just simply a podcast. We're at the London Stadium, home of the West Ham Irons, my football club. It's been a tough year of sports for me between West Ham and the Cincinnati Bengals, but we're here at SportsPro AI25. So, David, it is a pleasure to have you back. We've not seen you in a while, and it's good to have you back on the show.

0:40Go Eagles. Go Phillies. I'm sorry. No, thank you so much for having me. It really is an honor to be back and slightly terrifying to be on camera.

0:51Chris Stone:it's always nice where you can hide behind my webcam that i normally have at home recording these things and said now i've got the backdrop of a i don't know 60 60 000 odd stadium behind us but weirdly i've never been here for a sporting event i've only been here for a music one

1:06Nick Meacham:i'm usually here about eight times a year for football games uh usually more often than not negative than positive but the negatives make the positive more sweet you know what they say You can't appreciate the sun without a little bit of rain. So, yeah, I mean, let's be honest. We're on the same venue that Usain Bolt won gold in the 100-meter. Mo Farah won gold. I mean, you think about some of the athletes that have been out here. And then there's us.

1:29Chris Stone:And then there's us, yeah. The concert I was here for was ACDC, Great Australian Band. I'm so happy it wasn't called play. And really, we had a staff day here a few months back. And they had Black Sabbath here. so they're proper hard rockers out here in east london respect apparently they're actually from black Sabbath is actually from east london that's why they're the legacy which i had no idea until i found out that there was the average age of fans in the winter probably about 75 but they have no rocking out hard kind of we could devote 15 minutes talking about ozzy i mean rest in peace

2:02Nick Meacham:yeah well today david one of the things that we want to talk to you about and i will go ahead and plug a former show that we did together we talked about your time at the cowboy channel it's an excellent story you know i love the story about kind of how when the system goes down and you guys personally just had every single person individually reach out to every single subscriber i think it's just a great example of when things do go wrong how can you adjust for that and you've actually got a bit of a life update it's no longer about the cowboy channel we're going to jump into some of the stuff that you are doing now but maybe just give a quick update sort of where we've left off with the cowboy channel and where we're at now with you i'm happy to and thank Thank you.

2:38Cowboy Channel was a really interesting ride in that. I like that. You know, it was more than an eight second ride. But to be completely blunt, I mean, I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, I knew from a product side what I wanted it to be. So it went very top down. Like, how do we take this vision and reduce it into something that works the way it's supposed to? and during my tenure there I learned that every level of success is met with a different level of pain genuinely like I mean 5 ,000 subscribers to 30 are two different stratas of pain and when you get to 100 it's more pain and then 150 more so I don't know what's after that but I do know it's there.

3:31I mean, we dealt with things right before the sale to Teton Ridge that is now has my baby and is treating it very, very nicely. I'm very happy with what they've been doing. You know, we were hit with like a VPPA lawsuit, which I knew nothing about, but where some judge sued Blockbuster for releasing his video VHS or DVD rental history. And now lawyers go after you for sharing your user data with Facebook and Google. That was fun. And basically, there are two different law firms that are in cahoots to get your cyber insurance. So you learn that at around 125 ,000 subscribers. So I just can't wait to see what happens at 200, because I'm sure it's going to put another smile on my face.

4:23Nick Meacham:Well, that's kind of what we're here to talk about today, David, because you've got a new challenge, a new task on your hands. You're a bit of a builder. Some people, they like to jump on the train when it's already left the station. It's already got momentum. Not you. You like to build things from scratch. You're a visionary, someone that likes to take things, a piece of clay, and model it into something. The metaphors are flying around here. I think more of a monkey being given an assortment of blocks and fruit and, you know, has to kind of bang them together and figure out what to do would be a more apt description.

4:58But I appreciate it.

4:59Nick Meacham:I try. I do have a great deal of respect for you. Thank you. But you do have a new task in hand. You joined and you're going to try to build another platform. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about that, because then after that, what Nick and I are going to grill you on for the majority of this is how you actually go about the thought process of going from absolutely nothing to building it. So before we really dive into it, just tell us a little bit about the new project and what you're kicking off. I appreciate it. So we just launched Table Tennis TV. And after Cowboy, I was put in touch by my friends at JW Player with a guy named Flint Lane, who's a really interesting character.

5:39He sold a company called Bill Trust, which automated invoicing and retired and retired for two weeks and was bored out of his mind, like losing it. And he'd always played table tennis, like competitively, but semi like for real. And he spun up a new league within six months called Major League Table Tennis. And we're going into our third year right now. and uh we had a meeting and i knew i mean i knew i thought i was good uh at table tennis i called it ping pong uh like most americans um i i learned i was not good after going to one of the events where a former olympian uh beat me uh 11 or 11-1 surprise you scored one i did and i gloated and i i said were you really in the olympics are you really that good and he looked at me kind of quizzically and then pointed out he was using a bottle opener to play me.

6:37And at the end, I was covered in sweat and humiliated and just looked at him and just went, sorry. But my point is, after going to the event, I think for a sport to be good, it needs to do three things really properly. It has to be good live. It has to be good on your phone. And it has to be good on your couch. And the reason for that is, you know, lean back, like short clips, and then the live experience that we all, you know, places like this. And I didn't know what table tennis would be like live. So I went to one of their events, and it was great. I mean, you don't see the spin properly on television.

7:15I also called my friend and colleague, Charlie Beal, and asked him what he thought of the opportunity. And he was just like, dude, yeah. because the perception of table tennis in America is much, much different than it is here in Europe and Asia. Sweden, I mean, really, it's a varsity sport. I mean, they're genuine stars. And the idea of kind of building something from the ground up appealed to me for two reasons. One, one sort of silly, but the self-doubting part of myself says if I could do this with Cowboy, it was a fluke. Or if I could do this again, I could wear a bathrobe for the rest of my life.

8:01But really, the commonality of what I'm realizing, everything I've always liked to do is connect the audience with content that they haven't really been able to receive. I mean, I did that in Nigeria. I did that at Cowboy Channel. There really is just a real pleasure in taking something that I might not be into, but that I have a great deal of respect for and the audience and just giving them what they deserve. And that's not frequently done. And I noticed that a lot of table tennis content was just put up for free on YouTube. And I thought there would be a great deal of efficiency to really give it the tier one treatment that we did with rodeo.

8:43The second challenge is also out of ego, is how do I take a participatory sport that everybody knows how to play in America and turn that into a spectator sport? And I don't know the answer to that one yet. I think it starts with teaching people the rules and an appreciation for it. But that's my own personal challenge. But yeah, I'm just excited to build stuff.

9:06Chris Stone:So what exactly was the brief you were given? Was the brief, just we need to build a platform so we've got something to point people to? Because you talked about the fact there was already some content being made available on YouTube. Was it the monetization piece that was the priority? What was the brief? All of it. I mean, they were putting it on YouTube, but they were growing the league. But they thought there was an opportunity to really... We talked about the efficiency of created for the audience, that it is a fragmented audience. And that, to me, is just my favorite thing to do. When you have people having to go to YouTube, going to other individual league sites to find all of this, you know, the content they want.

9:46They can't do things like follow an athlete, follow a player and have it in their phone, have it really in one place. So, I mean, rodeo is very similar where people would go to a county fair with a rodeo every year, but then they go to the NFR. But they would only typically go to their rodeo or one nearby. when we consolidated the rights, it allowed people to follow the sport in a completely new way. At rodeo, it follows a circuit, but the athletes can jump around. They do that all the time. And table tennis is very similar. Certain athletes will be in various competitions all over the world. They bounce from league to league and from tournament to tournament, and it deserves the same respect.

10:29It's also the seventh largest played sport in the world, which I had no idea. and seeing it live, seeing some of the stars, I mean, it is like watching sci-fi. I mean, it is. It's faster than you think. It's cooler than I thought, excuse me. It's legit. Sorry.

10:50Chris Stone:So I'm curious on the dynamics here. So from what I understand of table tennis, I don't know a lot about the business side of the industry or the governance of it, but this world table tennis, they exist out of Singapore. they have their own series of events they run yep where do you guys then fit in into that ecosystem is it completely independent is it based in the u.s only from the the events that you're running and and what's the that landscape look like so major league table tennis is its own league and their model uh really is the nba which i love i love the ambition and i love that that's their model i mean really in terms of making the stars athletes giving them like i mean they use like 12 cameras slow-mo.

11:31I mean, it is one table. They've actually altered some of the rules, so they make more sense, like, you know, open serve doubles, which used to be, I'm going to butcher it, so I'm not even going to explain the rules, but they've changed some of the formats. But Table Tennis TV is one of the various leagues, sorry, Major League Table Tennis is one of the leagues on table tennis TV. So we have a deal with, you know, Andreas of Dain, who was gracious enough to work with us to give us North American rights for the German Bundesliga, where, you know, the number one player, Fan Zedong, is playing. In turn, we're broadcasting on Dain, which is a very just cool relationship.

12:18But we're also in negotiations to bring on more and more international leagues. so this will be the main repository, the main destination, if you care about table tennis. And part of the strategy is not just live sport, but influencer content. We created a show called Table Tennis Tonight, where it is sports center, but eight minutes, nine minutes, however long we want it to be, which is what's wonderful about streaming. I am not beholden to a linear timeline. I can dig on fast channels right now a little bit. Yeah. You can dig on it. No, but when you're not locked on a linear timeline, you can, like, I've been in TV for a while.

13:02Sometimes you end up having to fill empty space. It's the world's on water skis at the end. I mean, that's the joke. They can do that. Ours is, you know, there's eight minutes of stories. There's eight minutes of stories. If there's 12, there's 12. We can release whenever. And it's so freeing to be able to do that. But the goal is to give the users something, to give the people what they want or what they didn't even know they wanted, which is a very, very easy way with five to eight minutes to learn everything that happened in the world of table tennis across the world, including WTT, including all the leagues.

13:35Nick Meacham:Let me just shamelessly plug and ask a question. It is a pointed question. Where did you meet Andres Hayden? Here. There you go, people. Coincidence. There you go, people. Happy coincidence. As a very quick aside, at the Sports Pro Awards in Madrid last year, I was the first person presenting. And it was real, I mean, it was a true pleasure to present somebody for, I think he won Innovator of the Year, most innovative platform, someone I voted for who deserved it. And I was the first person to hand out the award. No one told me that I was supposed to hand it and then walk off the stage. so it was me and like four six foot six german dudes where i looked like slimer from ghostbusters and it ended up on the front page of a german newspaper uh so yeah thanks you're welcome

14:25Chris Stone:yeah next time you know we'll give you a bit of a better break next time yeah appreciate it like i

14:29Nick Meacham:said it's more just to let people know you know you never know what kind of relationships you might make at a sports pro event so like i said just a slight segue just to you know shamelessly plug you know, the company, Nick. I mean, seriously, some of my, like, this is real. I mean, not that the rest wasn't real, but there's a fun part of one's career when colleagues, vendors, people that you've worked with, people you've fired, become friends. And you guys have facilitated that. Like, I mean, I have friends from, you know, Kling, from Aceto, from JW, Magnus, people that I'd met at these events that have transcended just, you know, someone you see at a conference, like real friendships, like real exchanges of information that have been profound in shaping some of my preconceived notions that have challenged sort of the orthodoxy that I've held and also have been fun to bounce ideas off of to really move this industry forward, which I think truly needs.

15:30Chris Stone:Yeah, I think that's one of the difficult things when I talk to people about the sports industry is just how important the relationships are. People think it's a bit cliche, but I've talked to people from other sectors and they say it's much more cutthroat. It's much more transactional. But in sports, you need those relationships, whether it be for the conversations you can have casually between people or those meetings you can have at an event. And they normally can go somewhere over time, whether it's immediately or down the line. You never know when you'll be able to open up those opportunities to something more, for example, with your relationship with Dianne.

16:01Chris Stone:And so it is really important that, you know, that's why we do what we do, really.

16:06Nick Meacham:Yeah, exactly. And I guess just moving on, talking about those relationships, those partnerships, as Nick said, what was the brief? What came in it? So now you've gotten the brief, you've gotten the job. Well, you guys have hosted me for vendor dinners, and I've hired the vendors. I mean, like, it works. It really does. I mean, like, shameless plug, but it's real. I mean, it really is. It's like, it's why I come here. And, yeah, I'm like, I guess, a sports pro fanboy. So, no, I genuinely thank you all for the opportunity.

16:31Chris Stone:Well, thank you. So, let's get into it. So, you've now – give us an update. So, you've launched a platform. So, let's take back a couple of steps. You've got the brief. What was the next step you had to take once you were on board to build this platform? So, I worked out an arrangement with Flint about the timeline and the budget. it and uh i was immediately laughed at uh because they wanted it done in a much shorter period of time which i loved um i think the the i said well this is you know it's not easy it's hard and the response was well you know going to the moon is hard this is not hard and i i genuinely loved it and uh he was like i built the entire league in you know six months time and i'm like all right let's do it and uh i genuinely love the challenge and i i liked the the sort of no nonsense approach but also the lack of uh perfectionism as a flaw where if we get the 80 that's quite good like don't let uh what is it don't let perfect be the enemy of the good um so immediately you have to pick vendors and i looked at a lot of them i mean i just looked at them all uh which is such a it's a process that can go on forever.

17:45I mean, it really can. And you can get paralyzed by it. And so I ended up going with JW Player, who cut me a fairly decent deal that they're probably going to regret soon. Their partners, Tring, which do front-end apps. And we created a bespoke mobile app, very similar to the Cowboy Channel Playbook, where we spun up a website for news and integrated that with the mobile app because 80, 90 % of people's content is viewed on a mobile phone and created on a global phone right there. So that, to me, is the primary destination. People make mistakes, in my opinion, when they're building by prioritizing things they shouldn't.

18:31Such as? CTV. I mean, the experience, I'm sorry, is just get it to work. All the bells and whistles, in my opinion, are not that great and not that important. I mean, if you have a ton of money, if you have a ton of budget, yeah, then it becomes very important. But if you're just starting out and, I mean, we built this thing for like$150K, we're hemorrhaging money until we get to, you know, a couple thousand subscribers. So the first thing I had to think about was how do I do this right, incorporating all the mistakes, if you all know, are many, to build a tech stack. And we used JW, we used Tring, and we used, I went back to Kling, which I fired when I was, for year one Cowboy Channel.

19:17And so far, so good. I'm pleased with the choices.

19:22Chris Stone:So how long was the runway then between that and actually going live? Because you only went live like a couple of weeks ago, right? Yeah. Well, I did the sensible thing by lying to all of your vendors and giving them a wrong date. As everyone does well with their service providers is give them a pre-date before the real date. But they knew the actual roadmap, but I did need a pre-date because there are always revisions and always things that go wrong. I have to say what I liked about the providers that we worked with is they were hounding me for more information and threatening me with not being able to reach my deadlines, which is the greatest position to be in.

19:59I mean, I kind of always like being the dumbest person in the room. And it was great. They were like, you've got to get this done. So it would force us to push. And we launched on September 3rd and successfully. I still consider us beta right now because, you know, there's always once you launch, we still don't have an Android version. We're having issues with Roku because they won't validate our, you know, billing info, even though it's right there and you get this awful cycle. I mean, just little things that pop up. But we are streaming live content. We have live news. and we have a couple hundred followers, a couple hundred subscribers, actually like 300 or something so far.

20:42And this is not with spending a dime on marketing, even with that big of a promotional push, which I don't like to do until, you know, you're really at a point where the product is ready. And I would say it's there now.

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21:50Chris Stone:And so you mentioned Roku as the challenge of that. What is that mix of devices you're available on now? Oh, glad you asked that. I had to be very selective because of budget. Again, when you're starting with zero, a very good way of thinking is, we were talking about the term minimum viable product, which I don't like. To me, that means it's bad. For me, I like minimum viable good product. Like that's actually something people would buy. Proof of concept, I think, should be interchanged with minimum viable product. But we did a minimum viable good product. And we did it for Roku because it's the number one CTV app player in the, what do you call it, platform in the U.S.

22:40Chris Stone:Operating system? OS? Yeah, Gielder's Choice. Then Apple TV, because even though it's a lower one in terms of popularity, my gut and a bit of analysis, thank you, Mark Swick, for giving me some insight into the table tennis community for free, was that it's an older demographic but with a much, much higher technical sophistication. and Apple tends to attract people with more and more tech savviness. And, you know, bespoke mobile app as well as web and Fire Stick. And I did, I want all of the, like, I'm cool with paying the Roku and Apple tax and all of that because, you know, 30 % for year one when my CAC is probably$75.