College Athletics is Now Streaming to the Masses via CARES Act & Pixellot
By Adam Noyes
Medium.com and the FutrSport podcast recently created a great interview with David Shapiro, President of Pixellot, North America. Pixellot is an excellent production system for live multi-camera sports coverage.
Check out some highlights from that interview below.
As the calendar year turned to 2020 no one saw a pandemic coming. Fast forward nine months and the burning question across sports is still, “to play or not to play.” As organizers of events carefully weigh the options, Pixellot brings relief in the streaming department thanks to the CARES Act.
Through the CARES Act, if COVID-19 has forced a university to shift budgetary focus, then the school can use the money on tech like Pixellot to boost the visibility of live-sports events.
While this may not seem like a big deal to major college conferences or sports, especially men’s football and basketball, the ability to stream any/all sports for fans is imperative in today’s world. Pixellot is a crown jewel in these times on uncertainty. The company provides a jolt of life to sports programs everywhere. Fans, friends, and family can now tune in whereas if they weren’t in attendance in the past they couldn’t catch the action.
After spending his entire career in sports, Shapiro came to Pixellot to further “democratize” live sports. Pixellot is doing just that as it’s moved from a “nice to have” to a “must-have” for athletic departments. Serving as a revenue engine, Pixellot allows schools and leagues to engage with fans. Before the pandemic struck, Pixellot was installed within 3,000 US high schools. That number is now 8,000 and growing as the tech-infused content machine is installing 150 units/week.
According to Shapiro, the “company has learned how to scale quickly.” They’ve had to as Pixellot will stream 500,000 hours/month of live sports content across 250,000 games. Considering it provided *just* 100,000 hours in January 2020, Pixellot has scaled quickly indeed.
Outside of Pixellot’s core technology, what other tech has caught your eye recently?
“In my mind, COVID has forced sports organizations to [adopt] a tech-first mindset. The realization of crowd noise and companies like Spalk have my attention.”
What Shapiro is telling us is that he’s focused on providing a holistic fan experience for Pixellot users and sports fans everywhere. This mindset will forever allow the company to continue to scale. This is the embodiment of the “democratization” of sports.