SportVot enables professional-grade streaming for grassroots, amateur, and semi-pro sports events in India and global markets
It handles the end-to-end production of the streaming from setting up cameras, to adding in the graphics layer and providing commentary, to generating post-match highlights
The startup has raised ₹40 Cr until now from investors like IAN Alpha Fund, Anicut Capital, Lets Venture, Capital A, Omidyar Network, and Ankur Capital
The era of stratospheric price tags on sports media rights may finally have hit a ceiling. Even amid the sale of IPL franchises for eye-popping figures, the IPL’s valuation may have hit a plateau as the media rights of India’s premier cricket tournament are unlikely to rise beyond the last value of $5.4 Bn, per a report by Media Partners Asia.
Meanwhile, one of the biggest events in sports is facing a deadlock over media rights. The FIFA World Cup has yet to find a broadcast partner in India even as this year’s edition is only weeks away with FIFA being forced to reevaluate its initial asking price of over $100 Mn. Questions are even being asked about whether the English Premier League in football can sustain its status as one of the most valuable sports media IPs.
Amid this landscape, SportVot
presents an interesting alternative to the mind-boggling premiums on the elite levels of sports. Founded in 2019 by Sidhhant Agarwal, Shubhangi Gupta, and Yash Bhagwatkar, the startup has developed a white-label OTT solution to enable professional-grade broadcasting for grassroots, amateur, and semi-pro sports in India and global markets.
SportVot competes with the likes of CricHeroes, FanCode, and Stupa Sports Analytics in India’s sports tech market which is projected to surpass $3.5 Bn in value by 2027. It recently raised a ₹32.7 Cr round led by IAN Alpha Fund to bring its total capital raised up to around ₹40 Cr. The company also counts the likes of Anicut Capital, LVX (LetsVenture), Capital A, Omidyar Network, and Ankur Capital among its backers.
“The biggest challenge for any sports organiser is to be able to capture video of your sports tournament. Earlier, broadcast or video production or streaming was very elite. The cost structure would never make it a viable option for any average tournament organiser to even think about. What we do is simplify video capture through automation and reduce its cost,” cofounder Agarwal told Inc42.
Scouting the Field For A Gap
Interestingly, SportVot wasn’t Agarwal’s first run as a founder. He graduated from the University of Mumbai in 2012 with an engineering degree in electronics and telecommunication, and went on to spend a few years at Oracle before moving on to fintech startup CashCare. However, the entrepreneurship bug took hold soon after and he founded his first venture in 2016.
“My father used to run his own software company as well so I had that influence of wanting to start something of my own. After leaving Cashcare, I started a fantasy gaming platform focused on football, ThisGameWeek,” said Agarwal.
His first taste of sports tech had a good run and soon caught the eye of listed gaming giant Nazara Technologies. Nazara acquired the startup’s licence and began distributing its product in multiple countries through a partnership model, eventually leading to Agarwal’s exit in 2019.
Soon after, he founded SportVot with the aim of building a platform that helps to discover sports talent. Unfortunately, the timing turned out to be calamitous as within four months, the pandemic struck, disrupting sports leagues around the world. The startup had to put its operations on pause and scrape together an alternative idea to survive in the short term.
“We were not able to do much in the pandemic because of social distancing. So we were working with a lot of our organisers who used to run mandals and poojas; they used our system to stream bhajans and overlay lyrics on top. We were even working with a few political parties to be able to stream their rallies,” recalled Agarwal.
SportVot also got selected for a Melbourne-based sports tech-focused startup accelerator programme run by Startupbootcamp which helped them survive. In fact, the combination of these factors helped the company develop and fine-tune their product and better understand the nuances of the streaming space.
So when SportVot truly came into action in early 2022 and returned to their original live sports thesis, Agarwal was confident that its solution would see mass adoption.
The SportVot Playbook
SportVot’s business model is deceptively simple. All a customer has to decide is what level of service they need and the company supplies the rest.
“We can offer a full service provision where we send a person that will come and install a camera at the venue, do all the configuration and then let the streams happen. Or organiservenues can get going with their smartphone camera, and we are more than happy to support that,” said Agarwal.
According to him, most tournament organisers opt in for the whole service package, especially when it comes to big field sports like cricket and football where you really want a high-quality coverage of the whole field.
For a low-cost option, customers can opt to use automated cameras from SportVot’s hardware vendors that automatically track the on-field action. Those looking for a cleaner and more professional-looking production quality can even opt for a behind-the-scenes remote direction of the show, supported by SportVot’s cloud infrastructure.
Notably, SportVot also provides packages including graphics (for scoreboards, substitutions, identifying players, etc) and remote commentary from their network of commentators. It can even enable advertisement and sponsor cues for organisers seeking to monetise events, as well as automatically generate highlight clips for sharing on social media.
The service pricing follows a rental model where the customer pays an all-inclusive price for camera and equipment rental, streaming production, and the software, with pricing being defined by the feature parameters. Long-term customers also have the option of subscribing to take up SportVot’s services for a certain number of games over a period of time, although most customers opt to pay on a per-game or per-competition basis, according to Agarwal.
In terms of distribution, the customer can stream their game on any one of a number of platforms including YouTube, their own website, or SportVot’s in-house platform.
“We like to distribute kabaddi through our own platform since we have a significantly larger audience compared to other sports so there is a high chance of us making revenue. The customer also pays less to stream on our platform because it’s an exclusive ecosystem, but the content distribution has to make sense for us,” explained the founder.
Clearing The Hurdles Ahead
SportVot’s major customers include Reliance Foundation Youth Sports, South Africa-based SuperSport Schools, as well as a number of amateur, school, and grassroots sports tournament organisers. Outside of India, its largest markets include South Africa, Portugal, Israel, and the US. It also taps many customers, particularly in global markets, through partnerships with camera manufacturers like Israel-based Pixellot who bundle its services along with their hardware.
The startup has enabled live streaming for tournaments in over 35 different sports, with kabaddi, football and cricket being the most popular sports in India while rugby and football are the largest outside India. “Of late we are doing a lot of padel and pickleball which have suddenly become the same level as kabaddi for us,” Agarwal noted.
The startup claims to have streamed around 100K matches in the last fiscal year. The founder said SportVot ended FY26 with around Rs 19 Cr in revenue and is looking to at least double in scale in FY27.
Yet, the greatest challenge facing the company isn’t about managing its own business but something completely out of its hands – the quality of infrastructure for sports, particularly in India. This will be pivotal to take SportVot towards profitability, which it is yet to achieve.
“A lot of what we’ve built will completely fail if the venue where we deploy the cameras and software is not able to support it, and this happens 5-7% of the time after doing everything right. The baseline infrastructure at many of the venues is terrible, especially in India when compared to countries like Portugal and the US,” said Agarwal.
DIY innovation has helped SportVot identify workarounds, however, for many of these hurdles, over the past seven years.
Agarwal pointed to the example of the Brahmputra Volleyball League in Assam where matches are organised in districts so remote that e-commerce deliveries are unavailable. “One of the key components of live streaming is having a tripod for your camera or smartphone. The BVL venues started creating their own tripods out of bamboo sticks and using plastic bottles to support the cameras. In venues where they struggled with internet connection, they even brought in 5G dongles. These guys innovate so much, but the infrastructure challenges are real. Not every venue is well-equipped like an IPL stadium.”
SportVot is betting on the future of sports streaming being the grassroots rather than the top of the pyramid.
Yet, its growth path in India relies just as much on an all-round ecosystem that builds sports infrastructure from the bottom-up. Can it bridge the gap between hi-tech automated cameras and bamboo-stick tripods?
[Edited by Nikhil Subramaniam]
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