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This is Buying Sandlot — the only newsletter that focuses solely on the business of youth sports.
Today, we launched our new podcast with Rob DeSalvo, Pixellot’s North American President.
Listen to the Podcast
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I’m aware that only a small percentage of our 9,034 subscribers will watch or listen in-full.
So we bring to you, the reader, 5 things I learned from my conversation with Rob DeSalvo.
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What and Who
What: Pixellot is a leader in sports streaming technology for youth and high school sports. Its AI-powered camera systems capture and broadcast games without the need for human operators, making live coverage accessible to teams and organizations at every level. Serving youth, amateur, and professional sports, Pixellot also provides video analysis tools that help coaches, athletes, and fans engage with the game in new ways.
Who: Rob DeSalvo is new to Pixellot as their North American President. He has a background in media and sales, working in the golf industry for a long time with Golf Digest, and then a decade in ad tech.
Here’s what I learned from him about Pixellot’s business, their growth, and where the streaming industry is going next. His quotes are in blue.
1) The Focus on B2C Is Real
“We’re really starting to lean really heavily into that B2C side of it, where we are putting the cameras in the hands of those clubs and parents who want to make sure that they're live streaming and getting the memories of their children's games. I think that's a huge growth area that also is a more competitive space.”
Trend Watch™: He’s talking about portable, consumer-priced (sub-$1,000) cameras. This is a hot space right now, and Pixellot is attacking it with their Air NXT camera (priced at $949 + monthly subscription).
There are no shortage of competitors here - including Veo, Baller Cam, and Trace - and for good reason: AI is improving the performance of these cameras while costs come down.
As our recent Great Youth Sports Facility Report found streaming adoption is still very low (Pixellot has found similar statistics), so arming parents and coaches with consumer-level products is one way to achieve scale without more costly and time consuming installs at facilities.
2) AI-Powered Highlights Are a Big Deal
“The fact that these cameras can actually not only follow the ball during the course of the game and film everything and really make it look like a very well-oiled machine from a production standpoint, but then be able to actually recognize from jersey color and numbers to actually segment out the individual players and be able to put highlights together based off of what that player specifically is doing during the course of the game is unbelievable technology. And what's great is that it just gets better every day.
I think that we have only scratched the surface of where we're going to be from an AI standpoint, and what we're able to provide the end user and the consumer with from a data and analytics perspective at this point.”
Trend Watch™: I think I’ve mentioned this in three consecutive newsletters— but AI-powered highlights are a big deal right now.
There is effectively infinite video content of youth, high school and amateur sporting events, and only 0.005% of it has any consumer-level appeal to watch in-full (think LLWS, big time high school football, NFL Flag Championship).
The audience is almost entirely friends and family, and even then, it’s the highlights that people really want to see if they can’t attend an event.
To date, much of the AI + youth sports streaming conversation has centered around analytics and training (still a huge thing), but every parent in America wants short, shareable clips of their kids doing cool sh*t. On and off the field, actually. Sports streaming tech will take care of the on-the-field version… perhaps AI-glasses will take care of the rest over the coming decade.
Side note: Would love a world where we can just cue up a highlight reel of our life. “Oh, I scrubbed the heck out of that pan” or “I nailed fixing that light fixture”, so I can send my wife a recap of household contributions. Who’s making that tech?
3) Pixellot Says They Can Solve Multi-Sport Use Cases
“Let's just use our mobile Air camera, for example. When you buy that camera and you're setting it up, you actually choose the sport that you're using it for. There are some nuances and some intricacies of how we're going to film the game from an algorithm standpoint based on what sport it is.
We had a call with a potential basketball partner, and we were talking about some of the things with the algorithm that we could either enhance, change, advance forward, to help them achieve the goals that they specifically have for basketball in particular.”
Many of the conversations I’ve had with leaders in the space have focused on the differences between sports, and how they can present a challenge for a one-size-fits-all solution. While the challenges often represent edge cases, not being able to address them is usually a non-starter for a product or service provider.
So, many feel consolidation will happen at the sport level, because it’s so hard for any one provider to adequately service multiple sports.
Take, for example, what Pioneer Sports is doing in soccer, recently acquiring Rush and telling us they want to effectively own the youth game in America.
But for streaming, Pixellot customizes software and algorithms to address multiple sports.
Is that enough? Maybe. I spoke with other streaming tech leaders who noted the differences in even the type of event for a given sport— for example, the challenges between a basketball game in a traditional gym vs. a tournament with a 12-court layout.
Fascinating space, this is.
4) And Then There’s Infrastructure
Question: “I've had this theory, like, it seems like an amazing business to wire fields, right? Like, the richest guys in America are always like the infrastructure guys, right? The train tracks guys, the power line guys. Is there anybody out there who responsible for the electric and the broadband at these fields? And how often do you run into that challenge?”
“It's a great question and it's actually a huge part of the business and something that a lot of people don't realize when we first start having the conversations. You put a camera in and now all of a sudden you press a button and you start streaming. But we have to do site evaluations on all of these different fields.
It's one thing to put this camera in, but if you don't have the right wiring and the right setup and the right speed, the stream is not going to be an advantageous experience for your consumers. So that is all part of the conversation.
Some of these venues or through PlayOn and NBC SportsEngine will have people that go in that we're contracting and when we do the site evaluation and we put a deal in place, they're going out and they're doing the install and they're doing the wiring and they're setting up the […] and making sure that everything is exactly how it needs to be.”
You’re only as good as your infrastructure. Good life lesson there.
5) Scale Is Required For Advertising To Work
“If you're doing a Cohasset Little League game, maybe there's 10 viewers watching that game, but I think if you pool it, and let's say we work with a partner like GameChanger and we say, okay, on all the GameChanger broadcasts around the country, we're going to have this virtual logo sponsorship available.
And now Foot Locker can buy it, or a big national brand can own that for the season or for a month or something like that. It really puts the monetization value in a different conversation, and gives us the ability to drive a lot more revenue there. And then it's a rev share between us and GameChanger, so we're both benefiting from it.
And I think that the data that we're able to start collecting on that - and using GameChanger again as the example - now you're starting to feed into Dick's Sporting Goods, which owns GameChanger, and you're feeding into their retail media network, and you're able to start using that data, analytics, and that user profile to target those particular people. Because at the end of the day, this is the perfect audience to have your message in front of. It's engaged.”
We’ve harped on this a bunch lately, but much of the talk around youth sports sponsorship and advertising misses the fact that you need substantial scale for the unit economics to work. People in the media business understand this. Chuck Todd understands this (even if he doesn’t understand youth sports). But being able to bundle together tens of thousands of events is where the money will be made. Pixellot is a real player in that game.
My thanks to Rob for joining the podcast.
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Good game.