Parker McKeeLive television is a $250B market that has been dominated by 5 major networks and a few dozen talking heads. These mega companies leverage large teams of people to plan, film, edit, and produce their broadcasts. You may have seen production studios that look like this:
As a result, the average person has never been able to produce high-quality broadcasts on their own.
Enter Ali Ahsan and Arjun Balasingam. Ali was previously a senior PM at Circle and before that ran an internet media company that scaled to 20M+ monthly active users. Arjun received his PhD in CS from MIT, where his thesis focused on computer vision and AI systems.
Ali and Arjun are rethinking broadcast television with a suite of AI tools and a streaming platform that empowers an entirely new breed of creator. With their software, a single person can stream, edit, commentate, and produce all in real-time. They call it BigUp. Today they are hyper-focused on sports, soccer specifically, but anticipate growing the aperture over time.
Innovations in scene understanding, low latency image generation, high fidelity graphics, and LLMs are making the dream of a fully automated (all software) production studio possible.
We believe that removing all the barriers to creating high-quality broadcasts opens a new paradigm of user-generated media. A new kind of TV network, internet native, built from the ground up, putting the creator first.
Alongside their suite of AI production tools, the BigUp platform will also enable viewers to compete, interact, and engage with a broadcast in ways traditional television cannot. 87% of live broadcast viewers today are already using a “second screen” to participate in ancillary show experiences (e.g., social, stats, fantasy, etc.). The BigUp team wants to unify all of this activity into one fluid product experience.
The team at Pillar VC worked closely with Ali and Arjun as they were getting off the ground and provided the company with their first investment dollars. Today they are coming out stealth and look forward to bringing a new kind of media experience to world.