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Sports Engagement startup Rooter finds Success in Game Streaming

From crisis to booming success, Rooter an Indian live-sports fan engagement platform has transformed this year’s COVID-19 pandemic into an opportunity by turning to live-streaming video games. Working tirelessly over the course of six months, the teams at Rooter developed the tech in six weeks and launched a game streaming feature in Mid-May.

Their decision has helped triple their daily user activity and doubled the monthly active users (MAUs) on the platform, from pre-Covid time. This spike in the number of visitors comes despite the fact that live sports had come to a sudden halt across the world during the peak of the pandemic.

“We’re a sports activities neighborhood and when the dwell sports activities stopped, it was an enormous disaster for us,” stated Piyush Kumar, founder and CEO, Rooter. “We have been very clear that we didn’t wish to get into actual cash gaming (RMG) or fantasy sports activities. So probably the most logical growth of the product was content material. We will purchase dwell sports activities rights, so recreation streaming was the nice choice. It has labored very properly for us and for the avid gamers.”

While streaming platforms like Twitch TV, Smashcast, Hitbox and Beam are popular globally, a lot of players prefer YouTube and Facebook. In India, YouTube is one of the biggest platforms for game streaming, while a few more start-ups have also sprung up in the last 1 year, including Rheo TV and Loco, apart from Rooter.

“I see a humongous alternative in recreation streaming. The nation has 350 million avid gamers, and the quantity has grown exponentially. Nevertheless, if you happen to see the house, there are solely three Indian gamers. That is precisely the place the video streaming or OTT (over-the-top) business was in 2016. The one distinction in that we do not need to pay for rights. It’s content material owned and produced by platform and customers,” Kumar stated.

Founded in 2016 by Piyush, Akshat Goel and Dipesh Agarwal, Rooter connects sports fans with similar interests around the world, allows users to predict scores, play live fantasy and events with friends during the live game and facilitates building an exclusive sports fraternity.

Since the launch of the game streaming service, Rooter has clocked 4 million app downloads at no cost, and has built a huge community of gamers, which includes 80,000 from South India alone. The app is currently on the top 5 trending list, solely due to user downloads.

Just this May alone, Rooter raised $1.7 million (around Rs 12.8 crore) in pre-series A round from a clutch of new and existing investors, including Paytm, Adidas Family backed fund leAD Sports, Rockstud Capital, Founder Bank Capital, an early stage arm of RB Investments, Anthill Ventures, Venture Catalysts, and other angel investors.

To know more about such successes, keep reading GutshotMagazine.com

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