ATLANTA, November 11 (Hypepotamus) – The game is on TV. Your favorite announcers are on the radio. Getting the two in sync shouldn’t be a game of its own, says VC-turned-entrepreneur and avid sports fan Steve Hasty.
Homestream, an Atlanta-based sports and media startup founded by Hasty, is a subscription-based app that syncs your favorite college team’s play-by-play radio broadcast to the nationally televised game automatically. And it is going after superfans of the Southeast first.
Fixing A Sport’s Fan Listening Problem
The pain point was personal to Hasty, a lifelong Duke basketball fan.
“I grew up in Charlotte, my dad went to Duke, I went there for business school, and I’ve watched pretty much every game for as long as I can remember. At some point I got really frustrated with the national announcers. They’re trying to be unbiased and they don’t know your team. So I’d either watch on mute, or I’d pull up the radio call and pause and play, pause and play the feed, trying to line it up with the TV,” he told Hypepotamus.
Turning that workaround into a product required technology that has only recently become available, Hasty said.
“The way we’ve built this wouldn’t have been possible two or three years ago. The infrastructure to run it live and at scale, for every fan on every kind of setup, just wasn’t there. We’re now able to provide optionality to fans that previously wasn’t possible.”
Homestream users open the app and point their phone at their TV. The app reads the scoreboard to identify the game and the point in play, then automatically aligns the radio broadcast with the action on screen. Users can adjust the call forward or backward to fine-tune the sync.
Hasty said the early-stage startup is going after superfans, the ones with “the flag in the yard, the team license plate, who plan their weekends around game day. They already follow the school, the team and the announcers.” That gives Homestream a focused audience of fans already connected to specific schools, teams and broadcasters.
“Nearly all of our growth so far has been organic. We also give everyone the first 15 minutes of any game free. Once people try it, they get it,” Hasty added.
Since launching this football season, Homestream has recorded 6,000 downloads and more than 1,000 hours of synced listening. Fans listen for more than 90 minutes per game on average, according to Hasty.
“We’re fired up to see what this looks like for basketball and actually feel basketball could be a larger use case. We’ll keep adding schools in waves through the season,” he said. “College is where we’re starting but we already have some professional conversations underway.”
Making The Pitch To College Sports Radio
For Homestream, reaching fans also meant getting radio rights holders on board. Hasty started with the school he knew best.
“The first pitch was actually a cold email to Duke. They connected me with Learfield, which manages Duke’s radio rights. We spent some time building an MVP with archived streams – all the while I’m thinking this could just be me in my basement who’s interested in this solution. A pivotal point for us was running a six-week Beta during the finish to Duke’s basketball season last year. I made one post on a private Duke message board, it got over 8,000 views, 150 people signed up, and the feedback completely blew us away. People told us they didn’t want to watch a game without it,” Hasty told Hypepotamus.
For college sports radio rights holders, the pitch is pretty simple, Hasty explained. “This is new revenue from radio rights you already own. We take on all the cost – the engineering, the maintenance, the fan support – and nothing changes in the booth. Your play-by-play team gets in front of fans watching at home all over the country, and your sponsors come along with them. The way we think about it, there are three winners: the fan, the school and the rights holder.”
In its early stages, Homestream is available for Duke, Georgia Tech, Auburn, UVA, and UNC, with other big colleges in the pipeline.
From VC To The Founder Seat
Hasty has been in and around the Southeast’s startup scene for the last decade, mostly as a Principal at the Atlanta-based VC firm Circadian Ventures.
“Circadian was very much a startup itself – when I joined we had essentially $0 under management and we grew it to over $50M,” he told Hypepotamus.
He said there are several lessons he is carrying over from being in a VC seat to a founder seat. Specifically, he noted the importance of getting unbiased customer feedback, the idea of “nail it before you scale it,” and having potential team members try small projects before coming on full-time.
What’s The Next Play For Atlanta’s PlayOn! Sports?
Navigating a startup through the volatile and unpredictable media landscape is no small feat. But that’s exactly what David Rudolph has done at the helm of ATDC-graduate PlayOn! Sports, a sports media company for the high school market. The rise of streaming and subscription-based programming over the
Another lesson is being candid about what he is still figuring out.
“Be straight about what you don’t know. We’re a couple of months in, and I’d be lying if I said we had every channel dialed in,” he added. “I always appreciated the founders who told me that, so I try to do the same.”
Sports are big business in the Southeast. So is the SportsTech and MediaTech landscape surrounding it.
Homegrown companies working at the intersection of sports and media include giant players like PlayOn! Sports (high school ticketing and streaming), PrizePicks (daily fantasy sports operator), as well as upstarts like Cache (NIL deal data platform), Ember Sports, Moddy, CollegeSeats, Wunderfan, and The Players’ Lounge.
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Featured Photo by Wemax Projectors / Unsplash
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