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Singular CEO Andrew Heimbold: We Deliver on the Promise of Interactive Television

Singular CEO Andrew Heimbold pictured bottom right.

By Matt Ehalt

Our Startups series looks at companies and founders who are innovating in the fields of athlete performance, fan engagement, team/league operations and other high-impact areas in sports. If you’d like to be considered for this series, tell us about your mission.

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World’s shortest elevator pitch: “We’re a modern browser-based overlay platform.”

Company: Singular.live

Location: Los Angeles

Year founded: 2016. “Product released in 2018.”

Website: singular.live/

Funding round to date: “Privately funded seed round.”

Who are your investors? “The founders. We’ve done about $2 million initially.”

Are you looking for more investment? “Yes, we are looking for money but more importantly we are looking for the right strategic partners.”

Tell us about yourself, CEO Andrew Heimbold: “Over the last 24 years, I've been president of a company called Reality Check Systems, which built high-end broadcast solutions. That was my most immediate background experience. Working in that space for the last two decades let us realize those tools for high-end broadcasts didn’t meet the needs of modern content creators. 

“That's when we took a step back and looked at the type of content being created and how do we address the other 99% of content creators that could not use these high-end studio tools. That's where we came up with Singular. 

“Prior to Reality Check: I got into computers in college at UC Santa Barbara in the early ’90s, studying physics at the time. They had a high-end computer department where I was working and had access to lots of Macs and PCs and I was able to learn a lot of the software when it was first becoming pretty mainstream. 

“Right out of college, I started working in the web space in the ’90s, which was a great time to be involved in web tools. It was really exploding. The late ’90s, I moved over and started Reality Check, realizing the web space was moving a little slower in the real-time broadcast systems with OpenGL and real-time graphics. There were great opportunities. That's where we started doing real-time broadcasts, and that's where I met Hubert Oehm, our CTO, who was founding a company called Vizrt at the time, and we started getting to know each other and working together for the next 20 years while he was at Vizrt and I was at Reality Check. I’m now 50.”

Who are your co-founders/partners? “Hubert Oehm, CTO. He was one of the core engineers and a founder at Vizrt, one of the preeminent and largest software solutions for high-end broadcasts in the world for the last two decades. 

“Thomas Molden, chief integration officer. He ran a company called Molden Media out of Germany that focused on management systems and support platforms for large broadcast clients. 

“Steven Heimbold, chief product officer. He co-founded Reality Check with me, working on some of the largest projects from NASCAR through Super Bowls over the last two decades.”

How does your product/service work? “Singular is a browser-based graphic overlay platform that allows anyone to create broadcast-quality graphics from a web browser. There's no hardware required, no software downloads. We operate on a SaaS model, so users can just sign up and use the platform and then basically walk away when they're done. We work with everyone from very large esports and gaming platforms and companies right through federations and individuals who are livestreaming to YouTube. We work with a wide range of partners who deliver complementary technologies, and that includes everybody from Sony and AWS, through Grabyo, all the way through to TVU. Singular offers next-generation capabilities, such as localization, personalization and interactivity. We're also the world's only sustainability accredited, live graphics platform. We also have a Singular for Good program that offers pro accounts to schools and nonprofits completely free.”

What problem is your company solving? “The first part is that the current generation of broadcast tools are extremely expensive and complex, meaning that the only the top 1% of content creators, the networks and federations, can afford the millions of dollars in infrastructure to create these professional, polished feeds that you're used to watching on MLB network or any of the live sports productions. 

“But with the advent of next-generation technologies, not only streaming but just smaller, professional content creators—whether it's doing college events, churches, medical-related, even corporate communications—there's been a need for these types of overlay and information systems. We built Singular to not only work at the high end, but also address the other 99% of the market. 

“It’s addressing this huge, massive growing market of content creators, giving them the tools that prior to this were only available to high-end broadcasters and at a price. We saw the way people were creating and consuming content was completely changing. The tools weren't adapting to meet that need. We completely remove the barriers to entry. We introduced a completely new functionality and features that allow people to deliver a truly engaging and modern viewing experience for their viewers. Our goal is to set the new standard for our industry.”

What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “We've got three main tears. Free, which gives everybody an account for free, obviously. That just has a watermark on the output. We have a professional tier, which is $100 a month, and then an enterprise tier, which adds in the advanced features, dedicated support and some relatively new features we've got, which include things like SSO security through SAML, analytics, audit logs. Enterprise accounts range depending on exactly what the requirements are for each client. They’re custom, essentially. In addition, we have the Singular for Good accounts we give free to schools. Our target customer really ranges. It’s essentially anybody who wants to improve the quality of their live production, reduce their costs and do more sustainable production.”

How are you marketing your product? “Most of our users come to us through word of mouth at the moment. It’s very much through our community of users and within our industry. One interesting part of this was that a lot of technology in the past was based on buying products. Now, we're all used to service SaaS models, just signing up. We really made Singular so people can get up and running quickly and easily. Making a SaaS model, even at those pricing tiers, was pretty groundbreaking to allow clients to get up and running very quickly without having to order hardware and build infrastructure, which usually takes three to six months minimum.”

How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “Singular is based on web standards. We use the enterprise class back-end technology from Google and Amazon and others to build our platform. When we're rendering on people's actual devices, we can easily scale up to millions of simultaneous connections without any hiccups. The key thing is we based Singular upon scalable industry standards, so it scales really well. The last couple of years, we've doubled our number of signups each year.”

Who are your competitors, and what makes you different?  “We don't have any direct competitors at the moment. We have other people providing HTML tools. The significant difference with Singular is it's a platform that allows anybody to use our platform to build their own solutions and services, or to custom-build their own graphic overlays. We have clients who don't actually use our interface, but they tie directly into our API's and use us as their back-end.”

What’s the unfair advantage that separates your company? “We had feedback from a customer that when we asked him, ‘Why did you sign up for Singular,’ he said, ‘I spoke to a friend of mine who works in the industry and he said, ‘You have to use Singular. There isn't anybody on the planet who knows more about graphics than these guys.’ The team behind Singular is a multi-Emmy Award winning team that spent the last 25 years working in high-end live production focused on graphics. That is our absolute unfair advantage. The entire team is leaders in real-time overlay systems.”

What milestone have you recently hit or will soon hit? “We’re now hitting over 100,000 hours of live content every month that has Singular overlays. In terms of what we will soon hit, it will be really the wider adoption by enterprise clients. We're going to see some much bigger networks starting to roll out their use of Singular in the coming months. That’s already happening but it'll be more publicized later this year.”

In what ways have you adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic? “Because Singular was a cloud-based solution and we all work remotely anyway, we were already in a remote development situation with our team, creating tools for people to work remotely. We didn't really have to change anything when COVID came around. But we did have to certainly make people aware that this tool was available and how to use it in cloud and remote-based workflow solutions. At the request of a lot of our broadcast clients, our partner, Reality Check, developed an SDI solution that would allow them to use Singular within their existing workflows. The second thing we did was we recognized the pandemic had created a lot of problems for communities who were no longer able to engage and communicate in the same way. That’s when we added the nonprofits to our Singular for Good, so that churches, for example, and charities could continue to engage with their own communities. We really saw that take off.”

Beyond the pandemic, what obstacles has your company had to overcome? “The pandemic forced a lot of broadcasters to rethink the validity of cloud-based solutions and some of them have embraced it. Some of them are using hybrid models, and some of them aren't using it as much. But it's a whole new workflow methodology. So, educating our clients and our partners because this is the first product of its type that allows people to do something they did before, but in a completely different workflow methodology. We're not just helping them do the graphics, we're helping to understand where the production should take place, whether it's on premise or in the cloud or on a user’s devices. A big challenge we've had to overcome is simply explaining and educating our clients on the benefits of using this type of technology for the appropriate types of problems they're trying to solve.”

What are the values that are core to your brand? “We’re disruptive, empowering, accessible and sustainable.”

What does success ultimately look like for your company? “We see Singular as the new standard in content creation and audience engagement. People are using Singular today just to do a lot of the branding, but the real capabilities of Singular are the interactive on-screen, the personalization and customization of the viewing experience for the end users. We look at Singular as being a groundbreaking tool that will allow people to really innovate and create new ways to engage their audience, whether it's betting, polling, providing additional stats, multi-lingual, multi-sponsorship, working with gaming partners where you can cheer for your team and you're doing a tug of war, seeing who's cheering the most, it finally delivers on the promise of interactive television that would be around for the last two decades, but there's never been a platform or a way of people to create these custom experiences. Well, now there is with Singular.”

What should investors or customers know about you—the person, your life experiences—that shows they can believe in you? “A lot of our innovation and development has come out of partnerships with our clients over years. That continues with Singular as we're understanding and learning what clients’ needs are, and how they want to produce their content, engage their audience. We're working with them to provide the tools that allow them to do that easier, more cost effective. We are a flexible, nimble company, because we're built on cloud-based infrastructure, we can scale and pivot very quickly to adapt to the needs of our clients and users.”

Why should sports fans use Singular.live? “I’ve referred during this interview to Singular as overlays and graphics. There's another way of looking at them: they're tools. These graphics provide information. They're tools for communication. In any situation where content creators are trying to communicate to their audience and need to provide additional information, visualization, statistics, data information—not only rankings and player information but real-time data as it comes—Singular is a platform that allows them to enhance their content through the use of communication, delivering data and information.”

What’s your favorite quote about leadership? “‘The best way to predict the future is to create it,’ from Peter Drucker.

Question? Comment? Story idea? Let us know at talkback@sporttechie.com

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