Join Me in Our Whole New Game

I’m Rob, and I’m proud to be the new president of Pixellot in North America.

I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce myself to those of my colleagues I haven’t met yet, and to all our partners and collaborators who I hope to meet soon. Together, we are creating a new era, where sports reach even more deeply into our family and friend network, and the communities we serve.

Let me start by sharing something about me. If there was a Rob DeSalvo trading card – and I don’t think it would a collectible – it would say that I have been married to Kara for 21 years. She makes everything possible.

We have three amazing kids – Ava who is 19, Owen is 16, and Sophia who is 14. When I told them I was changing jobs, and explained what business Pixellot is in – and what they make possible – my kids said “Great, you are finally working for a company we can understand.”

I laughed at the truth of it. Adtech, where I spent the previous ten years, isn’t exactly a field that captures the imagination of teenagers. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my career in the convergence of advertising and technology – and much of that is relevant to Pixellot. After all, we are in the media and communication and attention business.

My life in sports.

Everything outside my professional life pointed me in the direction of Pixellot.
I played Division football at Rhode Island and I have coached just about every sport for my kids. I’ve felt their emotions, their team’s emotions, and my own experiences. I’ve watched youth sports build character and community; it is an essential part of the American experience.

The Universal Bond

Give a handful of kids a soccer ball – mix them up from the richest and the most struggling neighborhoods – and all differences instantly vanish. It’s true in America and everywhere in the world? Is there a better business to be in than youth sports.

Indeed, there is no doubt in my mind that Pixellot is perfectly poised – I am a fan of alliterations , they drive the point – at the brink of explosive growth.

Currently we broadcast more than 150,000 games each month from more than 40,000 venues and fields. That’s an impressive statistic, but it still represents only a fraction of the games that could be made available.

Consider how many memories are going unpreserved, how many moments of accomplishment – fleeting but of the greatest personal significance – are being lost.

Best kept secret

We’ve had great success, but Pixellot is still in many ways a company that needs and deserves wider awareness and exposure. That’s one of my primary missions, to be an evangelist for our company in as many channels, and in as many ways, as possible. I will drive this hard.

Our mission is to get our systems – the result of astonishing technical innovation by our R&D teams – deployed as broadly as possible. I want no game to be left behind.

To get this done I plan to dive deep into the business ecosystem that defines our unique industry. Our partners range from large and impressive venues – as complex and multi-layered as small cities – to clubs and coaches that represent a grass roots level of passion and commitment that never fails to blow my mind.

What’s also so compelling about Pixellot is the many roles it plays. We are the ultimate flexible athlete as a instructional tool for coaches, a discovery opportunity for scouts, and a reliable and meaningful revenue source for owners, venues, and networks.

Of course we are a source of entertainment, pride, and joy for athletes and their families.

Teams not Tiers

As I see it, there is no such thing as tier one or tier to or tier three sports. That’s demeaning and elitist. There are sports that have achieved more popularity than others, but what matters to me isn’t sheer numbers but sheer passion. I believe that every sport needs to seen, and the more it is seen the more it is recognized. Pixellot can drive this flywheel of success.

Our technology – and the machine learning that underlies it – are precisely tuned to the nuances, the athleticism, the kinetics of each sport. This enables us to capture entire games, the individual moments each one holds, with stunning precision and power.

Beyond the iPhone

Growing up, I remember my mom standing on the sidelines with a 35MM camera. She’d do her best to capture my best moments, take the film to the drug store, and if we were lucky we’d get a couple of shorts worth putting into a Woolworth’s frame.

Today, the iPhone has changed all that. We have the ability stand on those same sidelines and take videos of entire games.

But let me ask you, what percent of those videos do think live, unwatched, in the iCloud? What percent of still images are also imprisoned there?

What’s more – or actually, what’s less – almost no one shoots an entire game from the sidelines, meaning that the most important moments invariably happen when phone-meets-pocket.

At Pixellot, we have the ability to not just broadcast the entirety of games, but to create personalized highlights that are aligned with the way we consume media together. This is an opportunity that I witnessed first-hand in my ad tech career: if attention-hungry consumers are drawn to high-impact video in advertising, you can imagine how powerful that demand is when it is their kids or grandkids who are on the screen.

When it comes to engineering for impact, we are still in early innings or the second quarter – choose your own sports metaphor for the early days. Pixellot will get even more precise and personal with editing and production values that equal what professional sports can do; technology democratizes access, once again.

Looking ahead

Sports is as old as history itself. Pixellot is as new and today’s and tomorrow’s technology, That’s why I couldn’t be more excited about the future of our business in North America, and beyond. A decade ago, when we launched no one would have expected to see both the explosion in youth sports, and in the technology and processing power that drive our business.

Business, like sports, is about connections. In my previous career I used technology to connect people to products and brands. Now, I am using it to connect people to sports that matter in their lives. Nothing connects people like sports. And no one connects people to sports – any sports, in any level, like Pixellot.

Going forward, our ability to connect people, sports and technology will assure the mutual success of our company and our partners. And that will inure to the benefit of everyone in our community. Super excited for our kickoff.