Pixellot and PlayOn have extended their existing partnership for five more years.
The extension comes with a new business model for the pact — what the companies are calling the industry’s first AI-as-a-Service deal.
Here’s how it’s described in the press release: Unlike traditional SaaS models, which are one-way economic exchanges, AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) enables a revenue-sharing model between aligned stakeholders. Pixellot and PlayOn are the first to deploy AIaaS in the exploding sports tech industry and are among the first to introduce it in any industry sector.
Pixellot and PlayOn will share revenues driven by Pixellot’s Agentic AI and the end-to-end features it brings to PlayOn’s MaxPreps and NFHS Network.
Pixellot CEO Doron Gerstel said the approach will “unlock unprecedented revenue opportunities” in a release.
“We are leveraging the capabilities we have in AI to bring them and these features to our clients and really enhance the experience we’re giving the consumers at the end of the day,” Pixellot North American President Rob DeSalvo told Buying Sandlot.
“It’s something that is a vision from our CEO down to product and development. We are looking at everything through that lens of the AI being the service we are bringing to our customers at the end of the day.”
Pixellot has rolled out new AI-powered offerings on its streams including a yellow first down line for football, automatic replays and automatic highlights. The company released the new Pixellot S3 camera earlier this year.
The features also boost the MaxPreps Advantage coaching analytics platform.
Streams featuring the first-down line have seen 40% more fan engagement.
“This extension represents the single-biggest thing we’ve ever done with them,” Pixellot North American COO Colby Adamson said. “Not just the business model change, which I think is really positively impacting both of our businesses, but I think we are doing it alongside a lot of really new, innovative features we’ve been able to bring to the market — partially due to the business model change. And we’ve just seen a massive increase in engagement from families and users over the last couple of months.”
Pixellot streams over 500K high school games annually and has streamed over 3.4M with PlayOn since linking up in 2017.
Pixellot has 16K systems installed at over 9K schools nationwide.
My read on AI-as-a-Service: Pixellot brings the tech, PlayOn the distribution, and then they’ll share up-sell revenue. Makes sense. But I plan to dig deeper on the specific arrangement here.
One of the limiting factors of youth sports as a media play - indeed, PlayOn as a media play - is the lack of broadcast quality production. The industry will never get every youth and high school game to look like the Little League World Series, but AI can enable features that make streams more watchable.
And here, we get some data behind it: streams featuring the yellow line get 40% more engagement.
Somewhere, the GameChanger team works on a virtual strike zone so we can second-guess every umpire across the U S of A.
🤳 Follow Buying Sandlot on Social
We’re new— help us build up our social media accounts by following along: