Looking back on Livecamp
5 companies, 11 weeks, 1 (epic) demo day
Accelerator programs take many different forms. Our accelerator program, Betaworks Camp, has just completed its 4th run since its inception in 2016. During this time, the format has remained much the same: we accept no more than 10 companies building around a thematic area of interest to the Betaworks Ventures fund and invite them to join us in residence at Betaworks in NYC. Our programming covers product and technical topics, business-building and go-to-market, and pitch practice for fundraising. But most importantly, this format gives us a concentrated period of time to work closely with Camp teams to ready them for demo day and fundraising, while allowing us to acquire extensive knowledge about the frontier technology around which each Camp is organized.
Livecamp was all about live streaming and audience participation. As Ventures Partner Peter Rojas put it during our call for applications:
“We picked “Live” as the theme of our next program because we believe something big is happening at the intersection of television and gaming that is already reshaping media and culture…”
We ran Livecamp because we believe we are at the forefront of a new era — one where the audience is no longer satisfied to sit back and watch passively, but wants to interact, and influence, live experiences. But it also builds on a three-stage evolution of “Live”:
- Live 1.0: in which the goal was to broadcast live TV over the Internet. There was no interactivity, and streaming was limited to broadcasters with TV-studio tools.
- Live 2.0: democratization arrives in the form of tools to allow anyone to broadcast themselves, and home bandwidth is sufficient to both broadcast, and have an audience watching. Live streaming really takes off when the major social platforms integrated tools to go live.
- Live 3.0: We are at the beginning of this era today, and it’s marked by truly interactive experiences. Ones in which the audience can participate beyond likes and comments, and can play an active role in influencing the live experience.
It may still take some time to witness the full power of live in reshaping media and culture, but throughout Livecamp, during sessions with our expert speakers, 1:1s with our companies and numerous app TestFlights, we started to get positive feedback on this inkling we had about live streaming. Alongside our Camp companies, we discovered the importance of community-building and the inherently two-way and participative nature of this new form of entertainment. We learned more about the technical challenges that come with trying to stream truly live and the hacks to reduce latency. We witnessed the rocketing engagement rates when the audience becomes the game.
The companies
Any accelerator program is only as good as the companies it can attract–and for Livecamp we had a stellar line-up. A quick refresher of the Livecamp companies:
Bunch — group video chat for live mobile games
Contentflow — cloud-based SaaS solution for all facets of live-streaming
Culture Genesis — digital studio remixing digital technology for urban, multicultural audiences
Ghost Commander — themed interactive show streamed live on Twitch
Journey Meditation — an app for live group meditation
Some high-level numbers: 3/5 companies have completed seed funding and the remaining 2 companies currently fundraising. During Camp, Contentflow announced their €2 million seed round and Bunch announced their $3.8 million seed round. Ghost Commander brought in over 100,000 unique viewers in just their second live show.
The speakers
We were fortunate to have a roster of top industry speakers come in to share their knowledge and insights with the Camp teams. We welcomed speakers from Microsoft, Google, AWS, Mux, Stripe, Flywheel… to name but a few. Our sessions varied in format between presentations, Q&As and just open discussions about the key challenges each of our teams were facing–be it something technical, user acquisition-related or just advice from one CEO to another. Plus, the benefit of running a thematic program meant that many of the companies were facing the same problems and could solve problems for each other or share solutions with the whole group. We’re proud of the network we’ve been able to build around our Camp themes and we’re grateful to each and every speaker who gave their time to our companies during Livecamp.
“Fun”celerator
But it wasn’t all hard work and no play–there were plenty of opportunities to bring the teams together to let off a little steam and get to know each other better. A highlight was going axe-throwing and finding out very quickly who you would trust to defend you during a zombie apocalypse and who you’d consider leaving behind. Camp participants also joined in with many of the rituals at Betaworks Studios–our clubhouse for builders in NYC.
Demo Day
The work of the past 11 weeks culminated in the Livecamp Summit + Demos held at Betaworks Studios. Despite the snow, we were honored to welcome a packed house of VCs and executives from the entertainment and media industry. It was a great opportunity for us to share what we’ve learned about live streaming with the audience. For the companies, it provided the opportunity to make new and highly relevant contacts in the industry and to show-off their progress from the past 11 weeks. We also live streamed the entire event using Camp company Contentflow’s platform. We were able to clip out highlights from the stream in real time using Contentflow’s cloud-editing capabilities and share them as videos on Twitter. We can testify that the Contentflow platform really is as simple to set up and as efficient to use as they promise!
What’s next?
At Demo Day we also announced the theme of our next Camp, 🥁🥁🥁— Synthetic Reality. This is an area of deep interest for Betaworks and you can read more about why we chose this theme in our Medium post. This next Camp will follow the same tried-and-tested method of bringing together a group of builders in this space for 11 weeks and giving them access to top founders, engineers, academics and investors in the Synthetic Reality space, as well as mentorship from the Betaworks team.
For Synthetic Camp, there are a number of emergent technologies within Synthetic Reality that interest us:
- deep tech and tools for creating synthetic media
- detection systems for artificially created or modified media
- consumer applications that enable new modes of entertainment or connection
If you are building in one of these areas, we want to hear from you!
We’d like to thank our program partners, Mixer, Grey and Gunderson Dettmer, whose support has been invaluable to the running of our Camp program.
If you’d like to read more about the founding story behind each of the Livecamp companies, you can read our series of interviews with each founder in our Livecamp stories series.
And, if you missed the live stream of Livecamp Summit + Demos, then you can watch recordings of all the pitches here.
