SportStream
The second-screen bet that Facebook bought
SportStream launched with a placeholder marketing site and investors waiting. I built their web presence, led the partner program prototypes, and helped them prove a new fan behavior. Facebook acquired the company in December 2013.
Acquired by Facebook in December 2013. The partner program included the NFL, NBA, NCAA, and EPL teams. It started with a prototype for the Seattle Seahawks that had to ship before kickoff.
The problem
SportStream spun out of Evri with a product that worked and investors who wanted a real company around it. What they had for a web presence was a landing page. One page, pointing to the app store.
That was not going to hold up under investor scrutiny or partner conversations with professional sports leagues. When it was time to build something that could represent the company, they called me.
The approach
I built their WordPress site and external web presence from the ground up. But the more consequential work was the partner program.
The idea was to give sports teams a branded game day experience: real-time scores, a live social stream pulled from the app, conversation happening around the match as it unfolded. A second screen that kept fans in the moment and in the conversation.
The first prototype was for the San Francisco 49ers. Live sports events have no flexible deadlines. The game starts when it starts. That meant building, testing, and shipping under a hard clock - and then doing it again, and again, as the program scaled.
The 49ers prototype became the template. From there the partner program grew to include NFL, NCAA football and basketball, NBA, and EPL clubs. I worked directly with each partner to develop custom game day experiences, integrated real-time scoreboards and social feeds via API, and iterated continuously between events.
Alongside the partner platform I ran HTML email to an engaged audience of over 8,000 subscribers and supported the engineering team with troubleshooting and debugging across the stack.
The outcome
SportStream was acquired by Facebook in December 2013.
The acquisition terms were not made public. What is public is that much of the SportStream team moved into Facebook’s sports partnerships organization, where many of them still work today. The partner infrastructure and the relationships it produced were a core part of what made the company worth buying.
Why it worked
The partner program succeeded because it demonstrated something that had not been proven yet: fans were already using a second screen during live sports events, and they were hungry for a place to do it that was tied to the game itself.
The prototype did not just show a feature. It showed a behavior. That is what the NFL, the NBA, and eventually Facebook were buying into.
Who is this guy?
27 years on the web. Numbers to show for it.
I led web strategy and conversion optimization for an enterprise software company. I worked across engineering, marketing, and product to ship changes that moved the business. Here's what that looked like.