Origin Of WiderTalk
The idea for Widertalk formed in my brain late December 2023. I was sitting in the lounge of my wife's grandparents in rural Romania, feeling rather sluggish and hungover from too much pork and cognac, watching a Liverpool game with the family. The volume was high and the two commentators' voices bounced around the room.
My wife walked out the room announcing, "I cannot stand these commentators! They talk such nonsense." While I can speak some Romanian, I struggled to understand what the commentators were actually talking about, and wished for a friendly English voice to explain what was happening. Thankfully my nephew-in-law, and aspiring commentator himself, stepped in and provided his own analysis and opinion in excellent English. A few minutes later my father-in-law voiced his disagreement with the commentator's assessment on one of the Liverpool defenders.
This sub-optimal experience got me thinking. In a world of highly tailored, user-generated content, why do we not have our choice of commentators by default? Why could each viewer not select the audio that they would like to hear during the game, depending on language, style, or content? And why should a talented commentator such as my nephew-in-law not be given a platform?
I thought about it in the context of my primary sport, cycling. I enjoy the Tour De France for the competitive racing, however this isn't important for many people. The second most popular reason for watching the Tour De France in the UK is “I enjoy images of the countryside and cultural coverage of the event.”* Why should those viewers have a geography expert, a travel guru, or a food presenter as a commentator?
For the next 8 months I spoke to a quite lot of people about the idea, did a fair amount of research on competitors and the industry, and found 3 big problems (who needs 1) I wanted to tackle:
1. Atypical Viewers’ Interests are Ignored by Average Sports Commentary.
2. Sports Commentary is one of the Main Areas of Complaint from Audiences (Over 50% of TnTSport’s 1 star reviews refer to poor commentary**).
3. There are Too Many Barriers for Aspiring Commentators to Reach Audiences.
I believe that all three of these problems can be tackled by building a community and a platform that will fundamentally change the way sports broadcasters operate. It will enable users to
1. commentate over the event they want, with the friends they want, in the style they want, and earn cash as they build an audience.
2. watch the event with commentators they want, In the language they want, and interact in the way they want.
And that is the core of Widertalk! The team and I have been working to make this idea a reality for the last 9 months, with a VERY BIG launch event planned in October. This will be announced shortly.
In future posts I will detail out progress on the product build, future events, marketing, and anything else that I think might be of interest.
Any feedback or enquiries please reach out using the contact for or leave a comment below.
All the best,
Sandy
*https://business.yougov.com/content/47150-who-is-watching-the-tour-de-france-and-why
**https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/tntsports.co.uk?search=commentary
