Some startup ideas begin in a coffee shop. Others in the garage. For streaming startup BoxCast, its story begins at a funeral home.
More than a decade ago, Gordon Daily was helping a funeral home director rebuild his website. As part of the redesign, the funeral director wanted the ability to do video broadcasts of memorial services.
“At first blush, we’re like, oh my goodness, that is the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Daily said.
This, of course, was long before Covid. Before Zoom and Instagram Live. And before live streaming became as commonplace as it is today.
“It was really a tool to help connect people together in these very, very trying times,” he said.
With a successful funeral home broadcast under its belt, Daily and his co-founders Justin Hartman and Ron Hopper dove into BoxCast full time. The startup officially launched in 2013 to help organizations launch fully automated, reliable live-streamed events. The startup created its own hardware and software that enables broadcasters to easily set up streams and connect with viewers anywhere.
It lets users easily schedule broadcasts in advance, ensures a quality viewing experience with its “spotty internet-proof” streaming protocol, and lets users broadcast live video from their iOS device, web browser, or from the hardware or software encoder of their choice. BoxCast also makes it easy to quickly clip and share highlights from videos that can be shared on social media.
BoxCast works with any organization that wants to spin up a live-streamed event, but it found particular success with churches that wanted to bring their services to people who couldn’t attend in person. The business was steadily growing as everyone from small congregations to mega-churches adopted its platform. Then came Covid, and interest exploded.
“We literally saw a 20X increase in viewership in a one month span,” Daily said. “We’ve never signed customers up so fast in our lives. From a sales perspective, it was incredible.”
In 2020 BoxCast raised a $20 million Series A from investors including Updata Partners TechNexus Venture Collaborative partner Shure. TechNexus partners with corporations, like audio equipment giant Shure, to manage their corporate venture programs and build collaborative relationships with early stage startups.
Even as the Covid pandemic subsided, BoxCast’s viewer engagement levels remained strong, Daily said, which was indicative of the new normal of consumer streaming activity. Now that streaming church services became mainstream, it remained a regular part of many people’s lives.
BoxCast today facilitates more than one million broadcasts a year, Daily said. The bulk are churches, but it also streams football games and local government meetings. It’s worked with comedy clubs and political campaigns. It even helped stream content for presidential hopeful Marianne Williamson.
BoxCast, now with around 80 employees, is creating more features to make it easier to live stream high-quality content, which it plans to announce in the coming months. The goal, Daily said, is to continue bringing people together for shared events, no matter where in the world they are.