Boasting clients that include the likes of Fox Sports, NBC Sports, Bloomberg Sports, Canada’s Rogers and TSN as well as LG Electronics, Philadelphia-based fan engagement technology company OneTwoSee has quickly turned heads with its multiscreen application platform, which takes a slate of raw data surrounding sports broadcasts and translates it across multiple platforms. Data ranges from real-time game stats, analytics, predictive content, polls and social media trends.
Cynopsis Sports spoke with OneTwoSee co-founder and CEO Chris Reynolds about the convergence of data and viewing, how audiences have evolved and what lies ahead.
On launching: We founded the business about four years ago. At the time, we wondered if there was a batter way to deliver an interactive television experience through sports through connected devices. So delivering solutions in those ecosystems was challenging. We began exploring what types of sports we wanted to build structure around and started working with a friend of ours up in Boston to create a prototype. We didn’t do any market research, which was silly, but ended up building something around Major League Baseball. We demoed it on our own and generated enough success there that we approached Comcast on a regional level. It worked out they liked what we were doing and incorporated that into the product. Things worked out well for both of us and it turned into a larger agreement that included other sports. That helped us develop a reputation as a company that was reliable and we started to grow our business.
On clients: Currently, we support companies like FOX Sports with Major League Baseball product, the NBA, the NCAA as well as an NHL experience. We are working with TSN up in Canada with the CFL as well as hockey. We are also working with Rogers right now on MLB. We’ve put together a deal with Bloomberg Sports and LG. We are going to be doing some other things this fall that will be announced shortly around football. What makes us unique is that it is one thing to build a silo app around baseball, I don’t want to call that trivial, because it is not because more organizations could do that. What is difficult is to build a baseball app that is consistent across all screens. How do you do that across multiple sports and how do you do that across on technology platform? That’s really what we do. We now have product for professional football, baseball, basketball, the NHL, CFL, and we will be bringing soccer in before the end of the year. We don’t attempt to swim against the current. We match the look at feel to our partner’s requirements to work with the partner’s brand.
On the evolution of audience viewing habits: When my partner and I started talking about this business and its potential partners, it was almost like we were speaking a different language. That’s changed. Multi-screen experiences that run in conjunction with a live broadcast are now a must-have for not only media rights holders, but anyone who has a digital audience around professional sports. Audiences have become conditioned to utilizing applications and that’s one of the primary reasons we’ve focused on sports. Folks were already texting each other around games. They were on social networks talking about games and socializing their views. They were online looking at fantasy stats around players. So we figured it made a lot of sense to try to combine all these different aspects into one interface. What I’m really excited about is the convergence of the second screen and primary screen experience. We’ve been waiting for the technology to catch up on the set-tops and smart TV platforms where you could leverage that second screen experience into the primary screen.
On the evolution of product: We’ve always taken the position that we are always going to build a web-based product. Everything we were going to do would be in HTML5 for a number of different reasons. Primary, that allows us to optimize our experiences. When we first started talking to folks about our products, most of them were just very interested in native applications. I’m not in any way saying that native applications aren’t valuable, they are. But the flexibility of HTML5 allows us the types of experiences we want to deliver.
