Livestreaming Youth Sports Could Become Big Business | Sports Destination Management

Livestreaming Youth Sports Could Become Big Business

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May 01, 2019 | By: Michael Popke

If you’re not familiar with BallerTV, a sports media startup covering amateur sports around the country, you might want to look into.

Founded in 2016 as a basketball-centric service, the Pasadena, Calif.-based company provides live coverage, replays and highlights of more than 10,000 games on any given weekend. Former NBA All-Star Dwayne Wade even signed on as BallerTV’s first global ambassador

Front Office Sports reported in early April that BallerTV is set to broadcast more than 250,000 amateur sporting events in 2019: basketball, softball, volleyball, football and more. The subscription-based service provides parents and college coaches “unprecedented opportunities to watch amateur athletes throughout the country by way of a network of freelance videographers,” according to the sports-business news site. “The broadcasts are also archived for future viewings, preserving the types of games that for so long were only retained through memories.”

The site focused on serving a niche audience of parents, coaches and scouts recruiting athletes for colleges, and company officials say at least one school from every NCAA Division I conference subscribes to the service.

“We’re all former athletes that played high-level high school [athletics], and so many of our best memories are rooted in sports, and the content doesn’t live anywhere,” Sandeep Hingorani, one of BallerTV’s three co-founders, toldFront Office Sports. “We aimed to leverage technology to solve that problem.”

Youth sports might be the next wild frontier BallerTV tackles.

“We’re trying to move downstream,” Hingorani continued. “Where we win is using technology … to cover everything, even youth sports at an elementary level. We may be a ways from there, but there’s deep blue water ahead of us in the number of sports we can cover at [youth levels].”

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