ScoreStream Adds $2M to Build Out Its Web Technology Interface

ScoreStream, a San Diego sports media startup, has raised $2 million in an early stage round led by Sinclair Digital Ventures, a division of the Baltimore, MD-based Sinclair Broadcast Group (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SBGI]]).

Existing investors Avalon Ventures and New Enterprise Associates also participated, according to Derrick Oien, ScoreStream’s founding CEO. A number of angel investors in the Baltimore area also invested in the deal.

ScoreStream started three years ago with the idea of crowd-sourcing high school sports coverage, a market often underserved by regional newspapers and broadcast media—especially in this age of declining revenue and constrained resources for conventional media. The company now has 10 employees, Oien said, and recently moved out of the free incubator in downtown San Diego that is operated by EvoNexus.

In 2012, when ScoreStream was founded, Oien was an entrepreneur-in-residence with San Diego’s Avalon Ventures and the former CEO of Chumby Industries and its Internet-enabled touch screen device. With initial financial support from Avalon, ScoreStream created an iPhone app that enabled users to post updates on high school football games and other sports on Twitter, Facebook, SMS text messaging, and to ScoreStream’s website.

ScoreStream mobile app for smart phones
Mobile App for smart phones

The company also signed up a local AM sports talk radio station for its Web-based service, supplying game updates and stats to the station’s website. ScoreStream also was admitted to the downtown EvoNexus incubator, which provides startups with free space and other amenities.

Since then, Oien says ScoreStream has extended its partnership deals to include Fox Sports, USA Today/Gannet, Tribune Broadcasting, Clear Channel Radio, Yahoo’s Rivals.com, and Hearst.

“We have an embeddable scoreboard widget they can put on their website,” said Oien, who believes the company has proven its initial concept for crowdsourcing sports scores. “Now the question is, ‘Can we get fans to engage in a social manner, so that they’re sharing games and photos.’”

After disclosing last July that ScoreStream had received an $800,000 loan from Avalon and New Enterprise Associates that could be converted into an ownership stake, Oien said ScoreStream raised an additional $2 million to build out its technology platform, integrate with software being used on TV, and expand into lower-ranked college sports divisions.

“ScoreStream is leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to turn social insights into valuable digital content resources,” said Paul Palmieri, a co-founder and former CEO of Millennial Media, who is also an angel investor in ScoreStream.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.