Spectatr.ai Founder: For Content, Time Has Made All the Difference
3 days ago
In conversation with Spectatr.ai Co-Founder Richa Singh and Chief Business Officer, Shifa Garg
Sport needs technology more than ever to meet the demands of fans and brands, but most of us would agree that sport is not the most advanced sector when it comes to innovation.
And that’s especially true of smaller and emerging properties that lack the resources and bandwidth to be on the cutting edge. The good news is that advances over the past few years mean that relative slowness can work to their advantage.
The area of content production is a good case in point.
“Sports organisations are not always the most advanced in adapting new technology, and their understanding of how the cost of tech is changing can also be off the pace,” says Richa Singh, who co-founded Spectatr.ai in 2022. “I could see at the time that many people were still thinking in terms of what costs were five or more years earlier, when in fact they have plummeted. For example, the cost of 100 gigabytes of content storage has fallen twenty-fold.”
“But the change over the past few years has not only been about lower costs. Technology has leaped ahead. No one was even thinking about AI in 2017 and AI changes everything. Our company is all about AI. That is our point of differentiation.”
AI means greater speed. Spectatr.ai can deliver 300 clips per match with a 90% reduction in the time required. And of course there’s the cost thing. It’s touting a 60% reduction in costs from legacy workflows.
That is only the start of the journey.
Singh says, “Our whole tech stack is built around AI. And we are very vertically integrated from archive management all the way down to the app. AI-based auto-tagging enables us to search, discover and share digital content in real-time across multiple platforms, whether it’s live or archived. This means that we can deliver greater personalization of content on the way to real hyper-personalization.”
Spectatr.ai also has another point of differentiation. It’s an enterprise with women in most of the top roles. That makes for a lot of positive energy in the working environment, says Singh, who was a swimmer on the Indian national team as well as an academic high-flier. She was bitten by the tech bug while working in high-end finance for Capital One. She and her co-founder Rishabh Bhansali won backing from Sequoia, Alpha Wave and InfoEdge ventures for the launch three years ago.
“Our core value proposition is around video content – whether it’s identifying the most buzz worthy key moments, or identifying whether a sponsor was most visible, we leverage AI to solve multiple use cases for Rights Holders when it comes to content.” says Shifa Garg, the company’s Chief Business Officer. “There is a lot of buzz around AI agents in the market this year and while its early days, we’re already leading the charge when it comes to Agent-led hyper personalization. With our core offering around AI-enabled content clipping and tagging engine, we’re taking fan engagement one notch higher with our agentic workflows.”
In the real-time content area Spectatr.ai has an exciting new client in the Northern Super League of women’s soccer in Canada, which kicked off its inaugural season last month. Spectatr.ai will be serving NSL’s multi-year partner CBC/Radio-Canada and TSN/RDS plus ESPN across the border. The company also recently added a content deal with Table Tennis England.
On the agentic side, the team at Spectatr.ai will be powering the launch of a fully automated AI Agent for an NFL fantasy community in the U.S. ahead of the coming NFL season.
Spectatr.ai is expecting to announce new deals in the U.S. and there’s activity in Australia in the pipeline.
Gazing into her crystal ball, Singh sees IP in sport undergoing big changes in the coming years with growing opportunities for new entrants, like influencers. “I think sport is where music was eight or 10 years ago. Models are changing. As technology has progressed and will continue to change.”