The Big Interview: Breathesport
Following the announcement of four new names signing up to BreatheSport last week, co-founder Luke Sutton spoke to sportindustry.biz about competing in the digital sports market.
BreatheSport: What is it?
BreatheSport is a new dedicated mobile-first sports media company. We initiate fan and sport personality reaction to daily sports breaking news and live games, in a simple to use global mobile first experience. Basically, in a nutshell, if you love sport and have an opinion on it, you’ll enjoy BreatheSport.
We’re seeing a rise in sport-specific platforms in the last year, what makes BreatheSport different?
Our CEO and team come from a very successful mobile technology background and truly understand what global users want to see from a mobile first sports experience. We looked closely at the digital sports market and saw a clear gap in the breaking news and live event experience. There is nothing cool, clever and entertaining out there and we identified an opportunity to give sports fans and sports personalities something great and really fun to use.
We are often compared to Twitter, that’s frankly flattering being compared to a company worth $31bn and eight years old, when we are only six weeks old. We see great value building an exclusive mobile community of fans and sports personalities dedicated to the reaction to sport news and live games. We don’t share the same ambitions as Twitter but then again why would we, sports is best served through a dedicated experience and not through a social media platform – just look at SKY, BBC Sport and Bleacher Report.
You launched to the public recently with some big names, how has the platform been received?
Incredibly well. Our engagement levels are already higher than standard sports media businesses. The user experience will evolve really quickly as we have made a significant investment in developing the product experience. Our sports personality partners are really excited about the vision we have for the company and ignored other opportunities in sports technology companies to work with us. That’s a good tick in the box for our company.
How did you decide on your ambassadors?
Put simply, we wanted to work with the biggest names and voices from each sport and we are doing that. Our portfolio of personalities gives us diversity, opinion and humour. We also focused heavily on personalities that carry significant social influence and more importantly believe in our vision and are willing to commit long term.
You signed Will Greenwood as an ambassador – a big voice in rugby – does this signal your intentions ahead of the Rugby World Cup 2015?
Absolutely. Will is one of the most respected voices in world rugby and we are delighted he is leading our Rugby World Cup mobile experience. Austin Healey is also an important part of this along and together they provide great insight and opinion. We will also add to our rugby talent pool ahead of the World Cup.
Having the World Cup here in England and Wales will be fantastic and we will be delivering an amazing mobile experience to support not just the live games but fantastic breaking news reaction and exclusive content and insight around the tournament.
Looking past the World Cup, what are your plans for the platform moving forward?
Football is a huge focus for us and that’s why we have assembled the best football experts in the country to work with us. But we intend to create an amazing experience for all live sports that uses real time data. We aren’t taking a traditional approach in any way to what we are doing – for example, you can’t ‘follow’ sports personalities on our platform.
That just leads to passive behaviour as it has on global social media platforms. BreatheSport is throwing out the conformed approach to sports media and will be challenging users to engage. So many digital media businesses are built on passive behaviour – we are the opposite. Value is in engagement now, not in just how many users you have.
