58 START-UP ALLEY Spalk
Words By Ann-Marie Corvin
In this month’s Start-up Alley we listen to the innovators in the audio space. We cover a New Zealand custom sport commentary, innovative uses for audio watermarking technology and optimising audio recording for sports company that offers
SPALK
COUNTRY:
NEW ZEALAND 2015
STARTED:
Like many of the best tech start-ups, Spalk’s genesis began with two friends messing around on the internet. Auckland-based Ben Reynolds and Michael Prendergast wanted to entertain friends and family with their alternative sports commentaries, which they shared via social media, during televised events. It wasn’t long, however, before they’d amassed 10,000 followers who were all muting their TVs to listen to the pair’s bespoke commentaries. Early on, they took user feedback seriously. “We’d get complaints from people that the audio was up to two minutes out of sync. Everyone was watching the same images on the TV but the audio would take time to process through the internet,” recalls Reynolds, the company’s chief executive. The two engineers were both confident that they could hack something together to solve these sync issues, and that’s when Spalk was born. After an initial £400,000 funding round (some of which came from Reynolds’ former employer, the New Zealand-based VC Sparkbox Ventures) the product has been refined so that it can sit entirely outside a broadcaster’s production workflow. “It was really important that the system didn’t interfere with other operations
TEAM WORK What began as a two friends sharing their sports commentaries online has grown into an eight-strong global business
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