To the Playback community,
We’ve got some disappointing news to share: Playback has reached the end of the road. On Friday, December 12th, at 6PM EST, the platform will be going offline. Until then, the platform will remain active, although some features will be reduced or unavailable.
We know this news will come as a surprise, so we want to be transparent and give you as complete a picture as possible of how we got to this point.
We started Playback with the goal of transforming how people watch live sports. We believe that sports are at their best when watched together. Not every fan on their own, watching alone on their own timelines, turning off notifications for fear of spoilers, but every fan together, watching the story unfold in real time.
To achieve that vision, we built Playback around the live broadcast. We believed the biggest opportunity required accessing the actual game stream, so we focused relentlessly on building the best watch party experience, took our learnings directly to the leagues, and managed to secure partnerships with the NBA and MLB to become an official platform for their live broadcasts. This was a huge accomplishment! It took a massive amount of effort from the Playback staff and creators to make this happen, and we’re incredibly proud that we pulled it off.
But our strategy came with major challenges. To name a couple:
The sports broadcast rights ecosystem is incredibly complex and dominated by large corporations with very deep pockets. In order to compete, we’d have to get big — fast.
Even with league partnerships, blackout rules and the variety of ways people watch (streaming platforms, cable packages, etc.) severely limit the slice of the market we can actually authenticate to watch the games people want to watch on Playback.
Unfortunately, these obstacles have proven too big to overcome. Despite a monumental effort from our small team, we haven’t been able to break out and achieve the runaway growth necessary to continue to compete. And the recently announced broadcast rights deals worth billions of dollars mean it will be virtually impossible for us to continue our current partnerships into the future.
That being said, we hope this isn’t the end of Playback’s journey. We are actively in the process of selling Playback's platform, technology and team to a bigger media company. We believe this will give us the best shot to solve our key structural challenges and allow us to continue transforming the way fans and creators consume live sports. We hope to share good news on that front soon.
In the meantime, we’re sorry to let the Playback community down. To everyone who has invested their time, energy, and money: thank you from the bottom of our hearts for believing in the vision and joining us on the ride.
Sincerely,
RJ and Ari, founders
