BlackRock and Goldman Sachs support Media Start Minutes MediaOwning properties like Sports Illustrated, Players’Tribune and 90 Minutes, it was announced on Monday that it is getting Videoverse, an Indian AI startup that allows broadcasters to extract highlights and create content from sports footage. Videoverse’s clients include Indian Premier League and Women’s Premier League cricket, FIFA+ and broadcasters Nippon TV and Cubber TV.
Mumbai video Founded in 2016 by Vinayak Shrivastav. The company is backed by Bluestone Equity Partners, A91 Partners (Funding provided by former Sequioa Indian executive) and Moneta Ventures, which have raised $105 million to date.
While Minute Media or Videoverse did not provide valuation for the deal, sources told TechCrunch that the video was worth $250 million in the final round of 2023, while Minute Media had a similar range of transactions.
Asaf Peled, CEO of Minute Media, said that Videoverse’s acquisition is the biggest for the company in terms of value and company size.
Minute Media has grown to a large extent through strategic mergers and acquisitions, including the Player’s Tribune, charmingmental floss and STN Video.
In its initial days, Videoverse built multiple AI tools, including a tool to detect smoking and drinking, which helped mark certain scenes for movie certification, Shrivastav said. It also works on object recognition and deploys the technology for e-commerce websites to identify items in videos. However, the startup transitioned to building video editing and detection tools for sports broadcasters.
“In 2016, Hotstar (now owned by Jio) was growing up and they were looking for solutions that could identify certain points of action in the sport, mainly in cricket.” Shrivastav talked about starting a sports journey.
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A few years later, Videoverse abandoned other products and focused on video editing capabilities for sports content.
The company says it runs like a SaaS tool, which charges based on the number of footage a broadcaster or streaming service wants to process. Shrivastav said the company’s revenue has grown to $65 million, with healthy Ebidta margins ranging from 35% to 40%.
Prateek Sharma, the company’s chief strategy officer, said that over the past few months, Videoverse has launched new AI-powered tools that enable its customers to define rules to automatically generate content. For example, for basketball games, a broadcaster can create a package for all three-pointers scored by a particular player and automatically post it on social media. The platform also adds AI-powered translation capabilities to make sports attributes appeal to fans around the world.
Sharma notes that while the platform uses third-party models in its AI workflow, the company uses its own core models to identify critical moments in the game.
The main reason behind the media acquisition is the use of Videoverse’s technology and its own publisher network to better distribute content on various sports attributes and generate advertising revenue from distributed content.
The sports media company has raised $260 million, according to Crunchbase Data, which he said will cover more than 200 million users through its properties. It also provides a B2B platform for content distribution, which is used by nearly 500 publishers. Minute Media’s PELED says it’s a great opportunity to create more content and monetize it through the video platform.
“With video acquisition, we can introduce AI Suite to our customers, which is helpful for content creation. We can then add distribution and monetization capabilities to it to get more value from the content,” Peled said.
Minute Media hopes to target more American leagues with this new acquisition to enable them to adopt a highlight generation platform.
Various Report suggestion Fans are looking for something other than traditional coverage, especially on mobile phones. Minute Media is relying on AI to create this content. Peled said while the company has not made active funding, it may look for more funds to make acquisitions in the coming quarters.
