The Canadian company STN Video has created a great niche for itself by acting as a short-form video supplier working between website publishers and sports leagues.
It distributes sports videos to publishers such as the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Miami Herald and Sports Illustrated, as well as TV broadcast stations, to name a few.
On the sports-league side, STN Video has struck distribution agreements with all the major leagues in the U.S. and Canada, including the NFL, NBA, NHL, PGA Tour and Nascar, for example.
The short-form video it distributes includes highlights of games, interview clips and breaking sports news.
STN Video CEO Matthew Watson sums it up this way: “We service publishers with video content, technology and monetization.”
The company’s technology allows publishers to embed a snippet of code into news articles, and then it uses artificial intelligence to fetch the most relevant video from STN’s library and embed the video into the article.
Publishers also have the option to manually select the videos they want to embed.
Watson said the company currently does over 1 billion video views a month.
“It’s really hard to do what we do to distribute to over 2,000 publishers,” said Watson. “Even just to do deals with 2,000 publishers, because you’re on different websites with different content management systems. Google changes its browser every couple of months. The tech aspect is very difficult to do.”
One of the secrets to STN’s success is that it created a revenue-sharing model with its website customers. The money from the ad-supported videos is shared between the publishers and STN Video.
Asked if STN had any major competitors, Watson said, “There’s not a company that distributes content like we do.” He said there are some companies, such as Brightcove, that have video technology, which it charges for.
But STN provides more than its technology. It also provides the video content and its monetization platform.
Because STN has struck all these deals with sports leagues, publishers like that they can get videos for different sports from one distributor. STN has also begun to distribute content from betting sources such as DraftKings and FanDuel.
Comscore measures STN Video against other providers of sports video. According to its February 2022 analytics, STN Video ranks #4 in the Sports Category. The top sports video provider is ESPN, followed by Yahoo Sports-NBC Sports Network in second place, and Minute Media/The Players’ Tribune in third place.
Comscore says its methodology measures "Video Metrix Multi-Platform on video viewership across desktop, total mobile, all smartphones (iPhone and Android Phone), all tablets (iPad and Android Tablet) and OTT devices."
STN Video is a privately held company and doesn’t reveal its revenues or how many employees it has.
*The headline of this story was corrected to reflect that STN Video gets 1 billion video views per month which includes not only sports but also entertainment, lifestyle, finance, tech, news, etc.