FanCode, India’s premier digital sports destination, has entered into a new partnership with Google Cloud in an attempt to bring improved sports streaming experiences to the South Asian market.
What does the partnership mean?
For those unaware, FanCode launched under Dream Sports in March 2019 and it has swiftly grown into a leading sports streaming and commerce platform that serves fans across India with live and on-demand sports content.
Now, FanCode is aiming to forge a deeper relationship with fans. As a result, the company has decided to partner with Google Cloud in order to build a data-driven approach towards fan engagement.
FanCode believes that by entering the partnership, the company will be able to match audiences with relevant sports, engage fans with new content and build a set of engagement flywheels that include content, merchandise, and commerce. All of these will be personalised to the individual user.
The two companies have a successful history of collaboration. After all, through Google Cloud’s global infrastructure, delivery capabilities, industry-focused solutions and partnerships, FanCode successfully launched its biggest property, the India-West Indies bilateral cricket series, in record time.
The end-to-end solution setup on Google Cloud—from ideation, to testing and production, to rollout—was successfully completed within weeks, and enabled FanCode to deliver a truly immersive experience to fans.
Now, FanCode hopes that by using Google Cloud’s cutting-edge delivery capabilities with Media CDN, the company will be able to efficiently and intelligently deliver streaming experiences to users wherever they are. Plus, as the company will gain the ability to build a unified consumer data strategy using Google Cloud’s data and analytics products, FanCode will also be able to test and scale new content formats and business models to strengthen its net promoter score (NPS) and maximise shareholder value.
Why does this matter?
We’ve covered stories relating to partnerships between big tech companies and sports media in great detail of late. However, the majority of these stories have originated from the US and the UK.
This partnership between FanCode and Google Cloud is interesting because of its links to the South Asian market. After all, India’s streaming video market is in a steep growth phase and is expected to more than double in size by 2027.
Added to this, there’s an argument that the market in South Asia remains under-developed, particularly in the realms of immersive content, interactive experiences and the convergence of media with other areas like commerce and gaming.
With the recent partnership announcements from the US and the UK, it’s now inarguable that the media and entertainment industry is being disrupted thanks to the rise of direct-to-consumer models. By making an investment in the Indian market early, both FanCode and Google Cloud will hope they can get ahead of the game and corner a significant section of the market before others follow suit.