Bringing local sports talent to your homes: Why we invested in SportVot
Ram Baboo, a 24-year-old racewalker, lives in Bahuara Bhairawa. It is a village 98 km south of Varanasi. As a child, he dreamt of being an athlete, but he realised that his village had no resources, and his family had no money. He worked as a daily wage labourer with his father to support his family. At 17, he decided to pursue his dream and left for Varanasi. Ram Baboo won a bronze medal in the team 35 km race walk event at the 2022 Asian Games. But his walk from Bahuara Bhairawa to the global stage was much longer than that. The medal brought him recognition and some visibility, and it also changed his financial fortunes to an extent.
Ram Baboo’s journey, as special as it is, also tells a sobering story. There are thousands of Ram Baboos in Indian villages and smaller towns, equally talented and hard-working, who are languishing away. The reason: lack of visibility. Every year, there are over 250,000 official tournaments conducted across cricket, football, kabaddi, basketball, volleyball and badminton. In addition, there are about 5 million official games at various levels that have little to no footprint. Large sports OTT platforms stream marquee national and international tournaments, which makes it challenging for local sports leagues to grab audience attention.
Sports broadcasting generates significant revenues; the Indian sports broadcasting industry recorded a revenue of ~Rs 9,530 crore in FY22 . However, pan-India sporting properties such as the Indian Premier League grab the lion’s share of the revenue. What’s missing is the lack of scalable streaming platforms for local matches.
Enter SportVot.
SportVot, founded in 2019 by Sidhhant Agarwal, Shubhangi Gupta, and Yash Bhagwatkar, offers a platform for clubs, sports bodies, and tournament organisers to livestream their matches. It is also a podium for upcoming sports talent in India to showcase their skills and get visibility nationally and internationally.
SportVot aims to make sports broadcasting affordable and accessible for the local sports industry in India. Through its do-it-yourself mobile and web platforms, the streaming startup attempts to increase the discoverability of sporting talent across the length and breadth of the country. It offers a cloud-based broadcasting and streaming platform to event organisers, sports associations, and clubs to showcase their athletes to a global audience.
What are the barriers to democratised sports streaming?
For budding athletes, one of the largest impediments is being discovered. Usually, this is done by people representing various sports teams or private interests travelling to see them in action. These ‘scouts’ can’t be everywhere. To make their job easier, it would be great to have a way to broadcast and capture on video the performance of these athletes. Today, this is severely lacking.
India has ~150 million athletes across various tiers of competitive sports, out of a total base of ~318 million. These athletes participate in about 12 million games a year, of which less than 1% have any sort of digital coverage . Even established leagues such as the All India Football Federation’s I-League, the second tier of professional football, struggle to secure broadcast channels or OTT platforms.
Additional barriers, such as the costs of producing high-quality sports broadcasts make it difficult for smaller leagues and teams to afford quality broadcasting, hindering their reach and engagement with potential fans.
There is also resistance to innovation when it comes to exploring revenue models. Most traditional broadcasters still rely heavily on aggregated advertising as their primary revenue source. There’s limited exploration of alternative monetisation strategies like merchandise, ticketing, or data analysis partnerships. This restricts the overall revenue potential of the industry.
Add to that the lack of clear regulations and guidelines and rights ownership disputes, what you get is an environment where the country’s athletes are being let down at every level. SportVot's scalable DIY platform is helping empower local sports across India with affordable web and mobile streaming, and offering a cost-effective solution to change the nation's sporting infrastructure and culture.
How SportVot is building a sports culture?
SportVot’s cloud-based platform “SportVot Studio” is enabling associations and tournament organisers to showcase athletes globally, fostering talent discovery, community building, and additional revenue streams. By partnering with diverse sporting entities such as kabaddi and padel tennis associations, they leverage their network for three main revenue streams: a pay-per-play SaaS platform, sponsorships, and experimentally owned IPs/leagues.
As a new-age organisation, SportVot is better equipped to empathise and deal with the challenges faced by underserved and underprivileged athletes. But their commitment to change and impact isn’t just external, it can be seen in the very structure of the company. A total of 10% of their team members are women, 25% of their customers are women, and one of the three founders of the enterprise is also a woman. In essence, SportVot is building a future-ready sporting landscape in India, which is open to change and is diverse and resilient. Where accessibility, talent discovery, and community engagement are its main pillars.
The founder impact
Driven by three passionate people—Sidhhant, Shubhangi, and Yash—the SportVot team brings unique experiences, capabilities, and an intent to bring about change.
Siddhant, the founder and CEO, boasts of over 10 years of experience in building products for international giants. Shubhangi is the co-founder and CMO and her background spans communications, brand strategy, and creative storytelling. Yash, the co-founder and COO, brings a strong technical background and expertise in building scalable and efficient technology solutions.
In our conversations with the founders, we saw a desire to change the sporting landscape of the country and set an example for others to follow.
Our thesis
Increasing visibility for local sports talent has a multiplier effect by creating new opportunities for grassroots sportspersons and encouraging budding sports talent to pursue their passion.
The vision and mission of SportVot in building an enabling streaming platform for local sports furthers the empowerment of the Next Half Billion (NHB) category.
According to SportVot data, 75% of all kabaddi players are from low-income housing with another 5-7% from informal settlements.
A vast majority of the 70,000 athletes featured on SportVot in the same period were featured on a broadcast for the first time. Of these, over half come from the sports of kabaddi and football, which have a high skew towards NHB.
SportVot has showcased ~150,000 athletes every year and plans to reach 540,000 athletes in 2024 and 1 million in 2025. It is also helping create “resumes'' for athletes to increase their chances of achieving a breakthrough in their sporting career.
Along with awareness creation, it is equally important to develop accessible paths for athletes to get discovered nationally and internationally. SportVot has taken the first step towards building the discoverability track path. And that is why we are investing in them.
