Why we invested in Stream Sage
Audience analytics for the future of interactivity and e-commerce
Livestreaming boomed over the last years as a direct result of the pandemic, but the trend didn’t start there. Lockdowns only accelerated the growth of the existing livestreaming landscape, which was already an increasingly popular way to engage with influencers, attend virtual events, watch video games and, more recently, discover products through live shopping. The ability to use this channel more effectively, optimize content and essentially leverage it as a new sales channels depends heavily on analyzing user behavior. A data — driven approach that we believe is the backbone of not only live video engagement, but consequently the future of e-commerce.
To be clear, live video content is no longer a novelty and many years have passed underscoring the potential cross industry. The gaming world has been recognized as a driving force of popularity behind this with leading platforms such as Twitch alone amassing 6+ billion hours of content watched during the first quarter of 2022. The entertainment sector (e.g. sports) has grown incredibly, followed by many others such as the event sector. According to Sprout Social, even before the pandemic, 40% of US internet users reported wanting to see more live video. Conversion Live shopping in China, 5 years ahead of the West, has grown 280% YoY, from $3b in 2017 to $171b in 2020 (McKinsey). Now due to the pandemic, the last two years have caused a significant growth acceleration of livestreams with exponential amounts of data being created.
Stream Sage is a recommendation engine for live video streams powered by artificial intelligence. They gather/analyze streaming data in order to enable customers to enrich the user experience and effectively make content actionable. E-commerce is a massive driver here as customers can now use live streams as efficient shopping channels. Via integrations with Shopify, for instance, customers can not only easily make their video content shoppable, but even extend this ‘shopability’ to their blogs and images. Hence, customers buy directly from the point of inspiration — without leaving the experience. Moreover, the customer can fully customise user experience based on their behavior, enabling high quality engagements.
Founded in 2021 by Blazej Wojtyla (Poland), Wilson Hunter (USA), a stellar data/dev team of more than 20 was formed in Katowice, Poland . The cohesive team with years of experience working together at the founders’ previous successful venture — the developer agency Jazzy.
Here is what makes us so excited about them. First, the exponential data opportunity mentioned above and the technical capability of the team to address this. For a seed stage startup the team has already built a very sophisticated platform and they have big plans for the industry. In this fast growing market there is a massive opportunity for companies to better leverage data to optimize livestreams. Second, in the e-commerce context, this offers an entirely new revenue channel for many companies that have not yet utilized this channel for selling products. This means that suddenly companies can activate an additional significant revenue stream— not only with new live streams, but even with old content (videos, images, articles).
The opportunities of livestream analytics are extremely promising and with China leading the way in live shopping we have real data points regarding the conversion opportunities we can expect in the west. We believe that Stream Sage can become the data enabler of a new generation of live shopping.
