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Canadian company thinks time is finally here for its tech

The promise of providing multiple camera angles that allow viewers to control the video feeds they watch has been around for decades. But these types of second-screen services have never been popular, partly because of too many clunky experiences where one feed is not synced up with the next, YouSwitch Technologies, a two-person Canadian company with annual revenue of less than $1 million, believes it has “cracked the code” and says it has patented software that will allow leagues and networks to give viewers the option to use multiple angles if they want them.

The company signed deals with UEFA, which is testing the software for some of its European soccer games, and beIN Sports. But You-Switch is preparing for a bigger commercial rollout and is ready to hit the U.S. market in the hopes of getting U.S. sports leagues and networks to sign on, as well.

Sports network RDF has used YouSwitch’s multi-camera technology on broadcasts of Montreal Canadiens games.
“We’re trying to get one of those hallmark leagues to embrace our technology,” said Stephane Boisvert, a strategic consultant with YouSwitch. “I think we’re at the tipping point of finally having a league say, ‘The timing is great and our customers want it.’”

The timing has been almost seven years in coming. YouSwitch CEO Stephane Lestage started the company

in November 2008 with his friend Martin Fontaine, who is the company’s principal shareholder. At the time, Lestage was working as the director of operations of video-on-demand for the Canadian cable operator Videotron.

Lestage’s background is in television postproduction work, and he came up with an idea to create a software program that would synchronize multiple feeds in such a way that would allow for multiple camera angles to run seamlessly. Essentially, Lestage simplified the system used to deliver multiple camera angles to consumers. Rather than trying to add time codes to the video streams, which is a complicated process, Lestage synced all the needed feeds through his software.

“I got the idea to put all the images together and restructure it in a geometric way into the software,” Lestage said. “This recipe for me was so simple, I wasn’t even thinking that I could patent it. But apparently I could, so I did. That’s why we’re talking today.”

Lestage kept YouSwitch running as a side business while working at Videotron. This gave him more time to develop the application and allowed him to bide his time till the point when Internet video could handle the service. “When we launched in 2008, the video business and the Internet weren’t quite there yet,” he said.

Early on, Fontaine and Lestage cut a couple of smaller

LESTAGE
deals to test his software, such as one with the French-language sports network RDF that used YouSwitch for about a dozen Montreal Canadiens hockey games.

Lestage said that he was enthused by the results. But he encountered another roadblock in the marketplace. Leagues, like the NHL, started keeping their Internet rights in-house, meaning that the network relationships he was developing would not be as useful.

In 2012, the company closed a relatively small round of financing with smaller funds and angel investors, and Fontaine and Lestage began to explore ways to build YouSwitch’s business.

One way was to get Lestage to devote his full attention to the company. He would leave Videotron in April 2013, bring Boisvert on board as a strategic consultant soon after and reach out to former league and network executives in the United States to gauge their reactions to the software. The feedback, Lestage said, was mostly positive and he thought the time finally was right to try to expand the business.

“The demand for this kind of interface has probably been there for two or three years now,” Lestage said.

YouSwitch is about to close on a round of Series A financing, which will bring in less than $10 million, revenue that it will use to market the technology to U.S. leagues and teams.

“It’s not a question of finishing the product,” said Boisvert, who joined the company two years ago. “It is a question of commercializing the

product at this point in time. The product is ready. It’s been tested. The startup period is done. Now, it’s a question of commercializing the business.”

One problem Lestage expects to encounter is with networks that already have been trying to develop their own technology. Lestage said that many still are finding it difficult to synchronize the streams well enough to offer

multiple camera angles commercially.

“Our way of doing it has been patented,” Lestage said. “Still, it’s hard to sell something that is as simple as YouSwitch to a developer that has invested, sometimes, hundreds of thousands of dollars to synchronize another way.”

YouSwitch’s advantage, Boisvert said, comes down to cost. It is marketing software, not hardware, which could be delivered through a cloud computing system. “It’s a question of installing the software to a league that has its own operation for broadcasting or a broadcaster,” he said.

YouSwitch is seeking a licensing fee from leagues and broadcasters that would market the service as a free add-on to its offering. If they decide to offer it for a fee, YouSwitch would forgo a license fee in favor of a revenue-sharing deal.

The company is hoping for a deal with a league like the NFL, where a companion product that gives multiple camera angles could reside alongside NFL RedZone. YouSwitch also could pursue DirecTV, which could use multiple camera angles as an added benefit for NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers. The company also plans to play up the interest fantasy players are expected to have in the product.

But company executives also are quick to point out that the product is being sold as a second-screen experience — not something that would cause viewers to ignore the primary feed.

“Leagues are so sophisticated now,” Boisvert said. “As they become more surgical in a TV Everywhere approach, we have an additional layer that a sport like football, soccer, baseball can use.”
Lestage agreed.

“YouSwitch can be used to follow a sports event on the Internet. It can be used to follow it on a tablet. It can be used in a stadium in order to see the replay from different angles. There are all kinds of possibilities. But the big interest for us is to get the big sports leagues interested in that.”

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