Decoding FanCode’s sports streaming play with CEO Yannick Colaco
FANCODE
The Pondicherry Women’s T10 Tournament, Afghanistan Tour of Sri Lanka, and Men’s Volleyball Nations League — these are a few of the matches FanCode is streaming this week.
This is a small glimpse into the wide variety of sports and leagues the four-year old streaming platform offers to sports lovers in India. CEO and co-founder, Yannick Colaco, makes no bones about FanCode’s decision to stay away from top tier sports leagues. The choice of leagues is deliberate. The streaming platform wants fans to be able to access content that has a following but very limited distribution.
He says, “Sports fandom has grown significantly across sports, across different kinds of cricket, etc. But what Prasana Krishnan (co-founder) and I felt was that coverage and resource being invested into distributing content, outside of top tier events like IPL, the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup, and maybe the FIFA Football World Cup, was actually not growing at all.”
When the two decided that access is what they want to address, it became clear to them that properties like IPL are not for FanCode. “Big properties like India cricket and IPL are being monetised in a fantastic manner by large companies like Disney, Sony, and now Viacom18. They distribute at scale and monetise these tournaments really well,” says the CEO.
A world beyond cricket
Instead of earning 100 million users on a single event, he wants to aggregate 100 million users from 10,000 smaller events.
The size of the emerging sports business in India is Rs 2,094 crore. This grew by 87% in 2022. The contribution share for emerging sports has increased from 12% to 15%. Sponsorship spending stands at Rs 1,503 crore. In comparison to cricket, these numbers pale.
Colaco has built his career in the business of sports. Of his two decades in the sector, he spent 10 years at Nimbus Sport and six years as the managing director of NBA in India. He is perceptive about the changes in India’s sports consumption landscape. Therefore, it is in emerging sports that Colaco wants to improve the depth and breadth of access.
In the initial years, FanCode focussed on cricket. And that was because “there was so much space in cricket; until last year, we were the only platform getting women’s cricket in this country. To that end, we have done multiple partnerships with cricketing bodies across the world — ICC, West Indies Cricket Board, England Cricket Board, New Zealand Cricket, Bangladesh Cricket Board, and Cricket Ireland.”
Starting 2023, the streaming platform will increase non-cricket content on the platform. Sample this, in 2022, FanCode streamed about 6,500 matches live of which around 4,500 were cricket. This year, it aims to stream 20,000 matches. It will probably have about 40 or 50 live events on any single day across multiple sports. “And in 2023, 50% of the content is going to be non-cricket,” says Colaco.
Rugby, golf, horse racing, handball, football, hockey, baseball are the various sports FanCode streams. It has partnerships with Hockey India, Major League Baseball, All India Football Federation. Recently FanCode streamed the PGA Championship and is set to stream the Royal Ascot Race later this year.
Elevating the streaming experience
The one area where streaming beats linear TV is customisations. Viewers can pick and choose which language they want to watch in, pick highlights to watch, find live scorecards and other data about how a match is progressing, etc.
FanCode ran several experiments and finally settled on a few features that users liked best. The platform has a feature to enable quick access to a live scoreboard. It also gives viewers who have joined mid-way the option of watching highlights. “We have found elegant ways to help a user get updates very quickly. And for those who watch on landscape mode we created a whole lot of stats which come up on the screen as overlays,” Colaco explains.