Not just Deni Avdija: The startup making sports broadcasts accessible at all levels
The Israeli company Pixellot uses artificial intelligence to film, produce, and broadcast tens of thousands of games per month at a low cost, allowing youth leagues and niche sports to reach a new audience through subscriptions, sponsorships, and personalized content for athletes.
When was the last time you saw a live broadcast of a youth basketball league or women's volleyball on TV? It likely didn't happen, mainly because mainstream sports channels focus on more popular disciplines. And from their perspective, it's justified: producing television broadcasts involves high costs and must pay off. However, all of this has been changing in recent years.
The company Pixellot, founded by Gal Oz and Miky Tamir back in 2013, has developed automated AI-based systems for filming, producing, and broadcasting sports events live. Since they started, not only has the technology become more sophisticated, but so has the concept and the model.
"We have become a company that puts the athlete at the center," explains Oz. "To the basic broadcast, we add statistics or personal highlights for players, and then the athlete can use and distribute it." These days, Pixellot is entering the Australian basketball market, with its strongest markets being the USA and South Africa. The broadcasts take place on the company's OTT platform, on the websites of various associations — basketball, volleyball, or water polo — or on a unique channel for the Maccabiah.
"These are places that would not have been covered without us," says Oz. "We bring the democratization of sports to places that had no exposure, and we build an OTT tailored to the client." According to him, Pixellot films 100,000 games a month, "compared to ESPN, which broadcasts 30,000 games a year, and for us, it's at a dramatically lower cost."
"We are not looking for the next Messi"
Pixellot's largest market is high schools in the USA. "We are talking about 10,000 high schools, whose basketball games are broadcast to families and those interested, and they pay for it like Netflix, 13 dollars a month. Once, a high school filmed 20 games a year, and with our systems, you can film 20 games a week, because the cost of a game is only 10-20 dollars. In Israel, we cover seven basketball leagues, which are broadcast for free on the Israel Basketball Association's streaming service, Israeli Basketball TV."
What is your business model based on? "There is a paid subscription model, and there is a premium model — you watch a game for free, but to get a highlight of your child, you have to pay something. In addition, there is sponsorship — during an entire season, you can insert a virtual banner on all basketball courts in the country, which are only seen in the broadcast. You can also create an actual commercial break. Although we don't have a person in the production room who knows when the right time is in the game, this is where the AI comes in, which knows it automatically. The big challenge is to do all this at a high scale. You also have to not cross the line and not turn children into a product. We walk the fine line between a product that makes money and a product that is pleasant to watch."
According to Oz, the model is country-dependent: "In the USA, they prefer a subscription model without ads, in South Africa, it's the exact opposite. In Israel, part of the broadcast is funded by sports bodies and part by sponsorships — Mei Eden, for example, is a sponsor of one of the leagues we cover. We also work in Portugal, and we discovered that it is easier to enter developing markets because there is more need there."
At Pixellot, they believe that documenting lower leagues can also be profitable for higher leagues, and not just for scouting. "We are not looking for the next Messi, that is a very narrow task. We want to raise the level of enjoyment of sports for every child who plays and for every parent, it gives a much higher expectation. In American baseball, they conducted a survey that a child who plays until age 12 will be a fan as an adult, meaning the investment in children's sports will pay for itself later. 95% of the children we film will not end up being professional players, but they will feel connected to sports and will invest money in it as adults."
Where does Pixellot want to go? "The potential is infinite, because less than 1% of the sports that exist today in the world are filmed. The model we are building allows us to reach that."
