When the BC Coroner's office issued a press release on the recent overdose of Canadian actor Cory Monteith, it included an online video of coroner Barbara McLintock discussing cause of death.
The video, which was picked up by a number of local news sites, was distributed free by SendtoNews, a Victoria company that's carving out a profitable niche in the growing online video space, most often in sports.
So if you've watched any NASCAR highlights online recently, that too was courtesy of SendtoNews.
Formed in 2008, when former BCTV reporter Keith Wells came up with the idea of getting sports teams to shoot their own video highlights while on the road, the company has raised $4 million in angel investment since 2011, just opened a new London office and recently hit a major milestone: more than 15 million TV and online views of American Hockey League highlights, to which SendtoNews has exclusive distribution rights.
"We're expecting to continue this rapid growth in our distribution and our revenue," said SendtoNews CEO Greg Bobolo. "We'll be growing into Europe over the next couple of years."
The company has capitalized on the ever-growing demand for online video content and shrinking resources in newsrooms around the world to carve out a niche in online video.
It acquires exclusive rights to sports highlights – usually created by the sports organizations – and provides a distribution platform using an Amazon (Nasdaq:AMZN) web service to give broadcasters and newsrooms ranging from the Los Angeles Times to Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO) free access to the highlights.
The company makes its money mostly from selling advertising, although it also runs a subscription service for non-sports-related news video. For example, the B.C. government and RCMP have contracts with SendtoNews to distribute video used for press releases and press conferences.
"We're essentially an independent news agency," Bobolo said. "We go all around the world securing content deals for tier 1 [professional] sports. We spend millions of dollars acquiring these rights and then we syndicate it out to all our partners."
The company was formed when newspapers across North America – already suffering from falling advertising revenue thanks to online competition – were hit with the recession.
"Broadcast news companies are suffering from the same challenges in that they don't have the resources to go out and get a lot of this content on their own when it comes to tier 2 [semi-professional and amateur] sports, yet they still have a huge appetite for it," Bobolo said.
While still a reporter with BCTV, Wells realized that increasing quality and decreasing costs for video cameras meant that sports teams could shoot and edit their own highlights.
"In B.C., Global TV has jus t one truck and one camera," Bobolo said, "and they can't get out everywhere."
The company gained critical momentum in 2010 when it secured the rights to distribute video highlights of the 2010 Winter Olympics for pickup by non-accredited news organizations.
As the former owner of the now-defunct Dream House Publications Ltd., which published a luxury home magazine, Bobolo understands the challenges facing the traditional print media in the digital age. He joined SendtoNews as an adviser in 2011 and then became the company's CEO.
Most of SendtoNews' partners shoot and edit their own video. The one exception is the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA). SendtoNews recently created its own production unit to produce the LPGA's highlights.
The company's biggest distribution deals to date are with NASCAR, the American Hockey League and LPGA. It is now working on a major content deal in Europe that would cover a wide range of sports, including tennis and premiere league soccer.
"We'll be looking to close some very major deals with other tier 1 sports," Bobolo said. •
