Sports press conferences have become a form of performance art at times, bringing together athletes who don’t want to be there with reporters who know what’s said in that setting often is not that helpful. That opens the door for more inciting or repetitive questions. It’s little wonder, sometimes, that Marshawn Lynch just showed up so he wouldn’t get fined.
When the global pandemic created the NBA bubble and many sportswriters began joining video interviews from the comfort of their homes, Anton Rukaj started asking himself, “Why can’t I ask a question to LeBron James? If they’re doing it virtually now, why can’t I have a say in this conversation?”
That birthed the idea of FansView, an interactive video streaming platform in which users submit questions to athletes and even bid to be the postgame interviewer. These fan Q&As on that platform will be outside of existing league and media obligations and are intended to be complementary. Athletes will engage on FansView independently—after standard press interviews and casually, by holding their phone up at their locker, in the car or once at home.
Using FansView’s platform, fans can submit questions to ask after games and also bid to be the interviewer.courtesy of fansview
FansView has been testing its app in beta this summer with plans to launch the first week of September — in time for NFL and college football seasons — with a number of high-profile athletes already signed on. That list is headlined by receivers Tee Higgins of the Cincinnati Bengals and A.J. Brown of the Philadelphia Eagles, as well as University of Miami Heisman hopeful quarterback Tyler Van Dyke.
“What we’ve done is we’re going to get direct access to the athletes and the fans to create their own interview content,” said Rukaj, FansView’s CEO.
FansView will open with free and subscription tiers, the latter costing $7.99 a month and unlocking a number of features, including immediate access (others must wait 24 hours to view interviews). Before and during games, users can begin submitting questions and bidding on being the interviewer until five minutes after the competition ends. At that point, bidding is closed and FansView’s algorithms identify the 10 most common questions.
Subscribers can then vote on the crowd-sourced questions, with the top two being included in the five-question postgame interview. The other three, which will be vetted, are of the interviewer’s choosing.
“We’re increasingly living in an age where fans expect direct access,” said FansView adviser Fred Harner, a 25-year sports media executive with SNY, YES Network, ESPN and the XFL. “Increasingly, their fandom lies more with athletes themselves than teams. And just kind of breaking down that wall between the two, I think, is really exciting.”
When there’s live action, users are able to interact with each other in a forum, with live stats and scores populating the app through a partnership with Sportradar. The athletes are obligated to log in to FansView for their postgame interviews within 90 minutes of the game’s ending, though it could be much sooner. Subscribers are prompted to record a Fan Breakdown, a 30-to-60-second analysis of the game. Those get shared to the FansView community, which votes on the best video. The winner will be awarded a free interview.
The athletes’ involvement was largely brokered through FansView’s agency relationships, particularly with CAA, Rosenhaus Group, Everett Sports Marketing and GSE Worldwide. FansView declined to provide specifics on compensation, noting only opportunities for direct booking costs and revenue-sharing opportunities, as well as free branding for some athletes’ business ventures. The NCAA’s policy update to allow athletes to monetize their name, image and likeness helped convince FansView to pursue this business given the large potential market.
At launch, FansView is targeting daily fantasy sports players as its early consumer base. The company conducted market research indicating that 75% of such individuals would be willing to pay the subscription price, whether they are seeking insight for future fantasy plays or because a DFS account is a helpful proxy for the ardent fan who might subscribe to FansView.
Passions after a game can run high, but FansView has implemented safeguards in case a fan tries to go off-script during the live interview. “We have a ton of fail switches in place,” Rukaj says. Before a user can be selected for an interview, he or she has to upload photo ID with a selfie to a third-party firm, Trulioo, which specializes in online verification. Other identity confirmation is done via AI algorithms. There are legal terms and conditions a user must accept, and the athlete has a one-button kill switch if anything goes awry.
Some of that functionality is enhanced by tech provider, Amazon Web Services, and Chime, its video chat app. Chime’s software development kit enables high-quality, high-definition videos and automates the stream and graphics, sparing the startup a need for a video editor.
“We’re able to stream multiple high-quality videos, wrap them together and add additional complex, post-processing tasks on the back end that allows us to automate production-style video in seconds or minutes,” said FansView CTO and COO Agim Lolovic, who has led technology initiatives at several investment firms.
FansView has an engineering team of nine, with multiple iterations of upgrades already mapped out for the coming months. So too will the company expand its reach to more athletes, more sports and more fans with the hope of improving the postgame discourse to let those who just played share their thoughts, unfiltered.
“Obviously, they have to still abide by some of the rules, like they can’t badmouth the referees and things like that,” said Rukaj, “but if there was a blown play, or maybe the corner was doing a different technique than he was studying in film that week — those are the insights the fans really want to get.”
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Source: www.sportsbusinessjournal.com
