• Playback is a livestreaming service where creators watch and talk about sports with fans.
• The startup raised $22 million in funding from investors like Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six.
• It also reached a deal with MLB.tv to bring baseball to the platform, following an earlier NBA deal.

Livestreaming startup Playback secured $22 million in funding for its platform that connects creators and fans to live sports, the company announced on Thursday.

Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian's venture capital firm Seven Seven Six is one of the firms backing the startup.

Playback, which calls itself a "Twitch for sports," launched in 2023 as a virtual space for fans to come together and watch creators talk about sports. Creators can livestream games, share commentary, and interact with viewers through a written chat. The platform has attracted creators including NBA players Kevin Garnett, Gilbert Arenas, and Jeff Teague.

RJ Halperin, Playback's CEO and cofounder, comes from the investing and tech spaces. He said sports face a key problem that Playback hopes to solve: young fans are not watching live games as much as past generations have.

He wants to change the way young audiences consume sports.

"Sports is best as a content category when you actually get to feel the community and the social activity that lives around it," Halperin told Business Insider. "Sports thrive off the social energy."

The company's funding came from seed and Series A rounds. Seven Seven Six led Playback's latest round in September. The startup is also backed by Khosla Ventures, which led the seed round in 2022, and NBA Investments.

Playback is turning to creators to rebuild that community and offering access to live sports

The platform also announced on Thursday that it inked a new partnership with Major League Baseball to livestream games from MLB.tv throughout the season. That follows an earlier deal with the NBA's League Pass streaming service that gives creators access to NBA and WNBA games to use in livestreams. Users need subscriptions to League Pass or MLB.tv to see their respective live broadcasts on Playback but can access the creator's commentary for free.

"They've been able to craft a platform that offers sports fans a fantastic experience while partnering with the biggest league names in sports," said Ohanian in a statement.

Playback said it monetizes content through creator-led features like room subscriptions and "power chats," where users can contribute money to streamers. Looking long term, the company aims to add advertisements and sponsorship opportunities.

The startup competes with livestreaming platforms, like Twitch and YouTube, which have made inroads with leagues like the NFL in recent years. Halperin also said sports, overall, compete for user attention with social media platforms like TikTok.

Playback is concentrating on offering more live sports and leagues to set itself apart. Halperin said it feels like a "race against time" to get different sports onto the platform.

"We want to move as quickly as possible to try to build a bigger and bigger library of apps on our platform that allow fans to watch as much content as they want," Halperin said.

After testing live video features in the fall, newsletter platform Substack announced on Tuesday that it is now making livestreaming available to all publishers. This new feature allows creators to engage with their viewers and collaborate with other publishers.  The introduction of livestreaming indicates that Substack is following in the footsteps of other platforms like […]

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• There's a new experiential store in Los Angeles that blends livestreaming with in-person retail.
• The space features rows of hosts selling products live on TikTok Shop.
• The project is the brainchild of Outlandish, an e-commerce startup with roots in China.

Welcome to the TikTok-era shopping mall.

A new brick-and-mortar store from the e-commerce startup Outlandish is bringing to life the world of TikTok Shop. It sits on a busy street in Santa Monica's 3rd Street Promenade, wedged between a Sephora and a Chipotle.

Business Insider stepped inside the two-story emporium ahead of its Thursday opening. It features a first floor of branded stalls where a lineup of hosts sit in front of bright lights and product displays as they hawk their wares to a TikTok audience. On its second floor, visitors can shop for goods from those sellers, which include brands like Goli Nutrition and the electronics company Anker.

The aim of the store is to mix live online selling with in-person retail. Passersby can buy viral products, gawk at influencers or merchants as they sell on livestreams, or even join the QVC-style streams themselves. Products and sellers will rotate, as merchants can rent out space by the hour.

The store's Santa Monica location is in a tourist hot spot. Like TikTok livestreams themselves — which are sometimes interspersed into the app's main feed — it's likely to draw in visitors who didn't originally plan to watch livestream shopping.

On Monday, the yet-to-open space was already packed with live sellers chattering away. It was loud — there were a handful sellers simultaneously recording in one room — but it was still easy to become engrossed in watching a single host.

It's As Seen on TV, but for the TikTok generation, William August, Outlandish's founder and CEO, told BI.

"This is 'As Seen on Livestream,'" August said. "I want people that come in to not feel like they're in a studio, but to feel like they're in a space where they can pop in the livestream. They can enjoy the experience. They can grab some free samples, and they can buy in-person. That's why our livestream rooms are not blocked off."

Outlandish's live-shopping concept taps into a broader effort among e-commerce startups, like SuperOrdinary, to make the live-selling model that exploded in China and other parts of Asia take off in the US. It's a big focus among TikTok Shop merchants who use the e-commerce platform to sell goods in videos, livestreams, and a dedicated shopping tab. TikTok itself is heavily focused on making livestream shopping successful in the US. The company recently hosted a summit for partners where it emphasized live selling.

TikTok and its owner ByteDance are aiming to recreate the success of its Chinese sister app, Douyin, which drives hundreds of billions in annual product sales. Features that are successful on Douyin often get pushed to TikTok next.

In addition to TikTok Shop, Outlandish has experience working with brands to help them sell on Douyin and other social apps.

How live selling could break through in the US

TikTok Shop is still a relatively young e-commerce platform, having launched in the US a little over a year ago. But it's gaining traction quickly as users become more acclimated to buying from a social app. Content creators on the app are now driving millions in sales in single live-selling sessions, which TikTok recommends should last a minimum of two hours.

In July, TikTok Shop's US gross sales began topping $1 billion monthly, The Information reported. Outlandish said it helped its partners earn $1.2 million in sales across 1,300 livestreams in a recent four-week window, adding up to nearly 3,000 hours of live streaming.

Live-selling studios are popping up in major cities like Los Angeles and New York. TikTok has some at its offices that it makes available to partners. Outlandish aims to expand beyond Santa Monica into additional locations in Mexico and Spain in 2025.

Outlandish isn't the only company trying to merge digital shopping with brick-and-mortar. Mall of America kicked off a livestream partnership with the e-commerce platform Popshop Live in 2020, for instance. Other TikTok Shop sellers have experimented with adding livestreaming spaces to their storefronts, such as the New York-based pre-owned luxury store What Goes Around Comes Around. And companies like Amazon have envisioned repurposing mall stores to service other e-commerce functions, such as fulfillment.

"This is a whole new industry that's just getting built in the US," August said. "Very soon, it will be a massive job market as well, with a lot of people that will come into the industry, and it'll be their job to be a live host or to be a live operator or to be a live moderator."

Outlandish, which began in 2018 as a social shopping agency in China, is an official TikTok Shop partner. Many of the sellers in its Santa Monica space work with the company on other parts of their TikTok Shop strategies, such as influencer affiliate marketing. But the company also hopes to draw in local Santa Monica businesses and influencers, too.

Outlandish makes money from the space by charging management fees for its live-shopping segments. It can get a percentage cut of online sales as well. The company declined to provide information on the cost or length of its Santa Monica lease.

Its US Shop business could get upended if TikTok ends up being pulled from app stores in January, as mandated by a divest-or-ban bill passed by Congress. If that does happen, August said Outlandish's Santa Monica sellers could pivot to livestreaming on other platforms.

"If TikTok does get banned, I don't think these people are just going to stop shopping through livestreams," he said.