In December 2020 our company turned one year old. The beta version of the site was rolled out on January 16, and the official launch happened in February. Now it’s time to sum up the first results.
The pandemic caught the whole world by surprise, global sports actually halted for 4 months – during this period there were no competitions, no broadcasts, or even an understanding of what it could lead to. At the same time, the main competition the livestream market for SPORTRECS were such tech giants as Google (YouTube) and Amazon (Twitch); and hundreds (if not thousands) of local players in each individual country and region. But we were determined to become the best platform for sports streaming.
A year ago, we had nothing but a vision of the market and an intuitive understanding of the development direction.
A year later, thanks to our dream-team and premium product, we can confidently say – the path we chosen is right and the demand for our services is real.
That’s not just empty talk – to this date, more than 32 000 units of content have been uploaded to SPORTRECS and more than a thousand live broadcasts are held every month.
The first Russian partners of the platform appeared in March. And now SPORTRECS has more than 500 partners among sports rightholders from 26 countries all around the world in addition to Russia and the CIS countries – SPORTRECS hosts content from India, Brazil, the United States, Turkey, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia, France, Switzerland, Malta, Bangladesh, Malaysia, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Germany, Serbia, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland.
We take certain pride when assessing these achievements, but still keep a realistic approach – we are still far from conquering the world, but already know how to do it.
The most interesting highlights of the year:
- SPORTRECS now has top football content from Turkey – the English Premier League and the German Bundesliga
- we work with the Football Super League and the Volleyball Federation of Portugal
- of course, we must mention our partnership with UFC Russia, for whom we distribute content in the CIS
- the beginning of the relationship with the Brazilian Football Confederation – CBF will sell access to all their educational courses at SPORTRECS
- we have started working with IMG on the distribution of Euroleague basketball content
- in six months we have become partners with RFNL RPFL, RBF, JHL, FAoR, IHFR, VTB UL, rugby Super League and a dozen of various sports federations
- as well as the Ukrainian Footbal Premier League
- our partners broadcasted all games of the Six Nations Rugby Cup on SPORTRECS
- today we work with all major media outlets in Russia and the CIS
Thanks to our outstanding development team and the product itself, we have exceeded everything that was planned this year. To name a few:
- launch of paywall functions and paid services
- support of video playback in 50 FPS
- connecting multiple operators to process payments in any currency, anywhere in the world (Yandex.Money and Robokassa in Russia, all other countries – just Stripe for now)
- a mobile app for real-time streaming
- our own SSP and monetization that is soon to launch
- introducing multi-camera broadcast function with the ability for viewers to switch between cameras
- creating highlights and publishing them to third-party resources directly during the livestream
- the ability to send streams to other sites and monitor their quality
- and just a huge number of small features that made using SPORTRECS more convenient for both partners and users
Over the past six months, we have communicated (and continue to actively do so) with the largest media companies on the market – IMG, Infront, DAZN, bein, Eleven Sport. We were nominated for the prestigious SportsPro OTT Awards as the best new streaming platform and the best startup. Sportbusiness.com devoted a full-page article to SPORTRECS in the final December issue of the magazine, summarizing the results of the year.
We would like to thank all our partners and everyone who believed in us. And also all the critics – thanks to you, we continue to work on improving our product. A huge «thank you» to everyone who was there and always ready to help.
This year we will continue to change the wider landscape of the sports entertainment industry together – see you soon!