BoxCast Continues To Make Room For More

BoxCast hasn’t yet taken off, but the tech startup did need only four years to run out of a space at Burke Lakefront Airport.

Next month, the company will move to 2401 West Superior Viaduct, a three-story office building within walking distance of the West Bank of the Flats. In winning the support of the Ohio Tax Credit Authority in late September, BoxCast said it expected to create 71 full-time equivalent employees by the end of 2020, and produce $4.26 million in new annual payroll.

Within the last couple months, the company — which delivers high-definition streaming services to a wide array of businesses, teams and organizations — has also made a key acquisition, added another notable name to its board, brought in a prominent chief financial officer and inked a distribution deal that puts its products on the resellers market for the first time.

Not coincidentally, BoxCast’s revenues have more than doubled year-over-year and are “way past seven figures,” co-founder Gordon Daily said.

All of which is why Mike Marchetti, a JumpStart venture partner with extensive Silicon Valley experience, believes BoxCast could be setting itself up for a “few-hundred-million” exit in future years.

At JumpStart, Marchetti, who moved to Northeast Ohio from the Bay Area five months ago, advises high-growth, early stage startups. He has a background that includes nine years as the senior director of business solutions at Yelp and nine years in leadership positions at Yahoo.

“I think they have a lot of good ideas where they can take the product, and how to get it out to market,” said Marchetti, who recently became a member of BoxCast’s five-person board of directors. “They’re testing a number of different things. Depending on which works well, they can open a broader market. That’s what I want to see.”

One of its most significant developments is the BoxCaster Pro, a 4K live-streaming platform the company introduced at the National Association of Broadcasters’ four-day show in Las Vegas in late April.

Around the same time, BoxCast, which has deals with a wide array of high school and college athletic departments, made its first professional sports splash.

FC Dallas enters picture
FC Dallas in March became the first club to buy back its local digital rights from Major League Soccer.

After reportedly committing to pay the league $100,000 annually for the rights, FC Dallas used BoxCast’s platform to stream every match that didn’t air nationally — 26 in all — for free to the Dallas/Fort Worth market.

Twenty-four of the 26 live-streamed matches were simulcasted on KXTA, FC Dallas’ local TV partner.

“The broadcasts were very well-received,” said Gina Miller, the soccer club’s vice president of media and communications. “They included our game broadcasters, so they were familiar faces and familiar voices. It was like getting the TV broadcast in your hand, laptop or mobile device.”

Miller said the live streams didn’t produce “ground-breaking, earth-shattering numbers,” but said “it’s a platform we can develop and expand for sure.”

FC Dallas didn’t monetize the local product, which BoxCast said drew a total audience of 41,000 views in the first season, but Miller said that’s something the club will look to do in coming seasons.

As more pro sports teams seek to control their content, BoxCast believes its platform can be of significant value.

“The world is changing,” said Daily, the company’s president. “Even if you see something on TV, a lot of people prefer to watch it on their devices. We all used to gather on one TV. Now everyone watches it on their own device.”

Always be closing
As those consumption habits have changed, BoxCast is attempting to gobble up large chunks of the streaming software and hardware markets.

In the first week of September, BoxCast acquired MV Designlabs, a Cleveland company that designs and builds complex technology systems.

BoxCast had been outsourcing some of its hardware to MV, and Daily said he figured “we can get further with them being part of the team.”

As a result, all five of MV’s employees are now under the expanding BoxCast umbrella, which Daily said removes a “layer of competition and overhead.”

A month after that deal was finalized, BoxCast inked a partnership with 1SourceVideo, a New Jersey-based national distributor for specialty video products. Soon, BoxCast’s streaming products will be available for purchase on 1Source’s network of 2,000 resellers.

Daily credited vice president of marketing Sam Brenner with creating a successful content marketing strategy.

“Now, all of our sales team doesn’t spend time on outbound (calls). They just close deals (that come to them),” Daily said.

More than 30% of those deals are coming via resellers, the BoxCast president said.

Daily’s executive team also has added Mike Vantusko — who had spent the last seven years as the chief financial officer at OverDrive and, most recently, MRI Software — as an investor, adviser and part-time CFO. And Ed Cochran, a longtime-lawyer-turned-investor, has joined a board that also includes the likes of Sam Gerace, the CEO of Veritix until it was acquired by AXS in 2015.

The newest board member, JumpStart’s Marchetti, said BoxCast, which has raised more than $4 million to date, is opening another investment round. The former Yelp executive said Daily has built “an incredible team” that has all the data points for sustained success.

“Their churn (rate) is really low, and the long-term value with customers is very high,” Marchetti said. “Those are good metrics that are all aligned well to be successful.”

Daily, who hasn’t been shy about adding big-name vets to his young team, added, “We’re in very careful conversations in choosing who we want to partner with. It’s been a really good run. We can’t wait to see who it is we end up partnering with. We’re at the stage where if we see an opportunity, we go for it.”

This story originally appeared on Crain’s Cleveland Business.