Startup Media, backed by BlackRock and Goldman’s Sachs, which own properties such as Sports Illustrated, The Players’ Tribune, 90 Minutes, announced on Monday that it has acquired an Indian AI startup that allows broadcasters to extract highlights and create content from sports footage. Videoverse’s clients include the Indian Premier League and Women’s Premier League (Cricket) Tournaments, FIFA+, and broadcasters Nippon TV and Clubber TV.
Mumbai-based Video Over was founded in 2016 by Vinayak Shrivastav, Saket Dandotia and Alok Patil. The company is backed by Bluestone Equity Partners, A91 Partners (a fund of former Sequoia India executives), Alpha Wave, Evolvence India and Moneta Ventures, and has raised $105 million to date.
Minute Media or Videooverse did not provide a valuation of the deal, but sources told TechCrunch that video overs were worth between $200 million and $250 million during the final round of 2023, with Minute Media’s deals in similar range.
Minute Media CEO Asaf Peled said the acquisition of Videooverse is the biggest for the company in terms of both value and company size.
Minute Media has grown primarily through strategic mergers and acquisitions, including player tribune, fan-equipped, mental floss, and STN video.
In the first few days, Shrivastav said he built multiple AI tools in video, including those that detect smoking and drinking. This helped Indian sensor boards flag certain scenes for film certification. It also works to identify objects, and has deployed technology for e-commerce sites to identify items in videos. However, startups have moved to building video editing and detection tools for sports broadcasters.
“In 2016, Hotstar (now owned by JIO) was growing and was looking for solutions that could identify specific action points in sports and primarily cricket,” Shrivastav said of starting a sporting journey.
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A few years later, Videooverse dropped other products and focused on video editing capabilities for sports content.
The company said it works like a SaaS tool that broadcasters or streaming services charge based on the number of hours of footage they want to process. The company said it has grown to a healthy Ebidta margin of $65 million and 35% to 40%.
Prateek Sharma, the company’s chief strategy officer, said that video overs will launch new AI-powered tools over the past few months, allowing clients to define rules for automatically generating content. For example, in a basketball game, the station can create a package of all three-pointers scored by a particular player and automatically publish it on social media. The platform also adds AI-powered translation capabilities to ensure sports properties reach fans around the world.
Sharma has noted that while the platform uses third-party models in its AI workflow, the company uses its own core model to identify key moments within the game.
The main reason for the acquisition of Minute Media is to use Videooverse’s Tech and its own publisher network to better distribute content across a variety of sports properties and generate ad revenue from distributed content.
The sports media company that raised $260 million said the company reaches more than 200 million users each month through its properties, according to data from CrunchBase. It also offers a B2B platform for content distribution, used by almost 500 publishers. Minute Media’s Peled said this provides a good opportunity to create and monetize more content through the Videooverse platform.
“Video acquisition allows you to go to customers and sell your AI suite. This helps you create content. On top of that, you can add distribution and monetization capabilities on top of it, to get more value from the content,” Pered said.
With this new acquisition, Minute Media hopes to target more US-based leagues and adopt a highlight generation platform.
Multiple reports suggest that fans are looking for different types of content other than traditional coverage. Especially on mobile phones. Minute Media banks with AI to create its content. Pered said the company is not an active funding round, but may look for more funds in the upcoming quarter for the acquisition.
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