How OneTwoSee’s baseball app is getting in front of millions of Comcast subscribers

Just after OneTwoSee moved up and out of cofounder Jason Angelides’ basement at 20th and Brandywine, the startup landed its first commercial customer: Comcast Sports Network. Not too shabby.
CSN featured OneTwoSee’s real-time baseball stats app on several of its local sites, including CSNPhilly.
Three years later, the startup outgrew its office space at Center City’s Seed Philly, raised $1.3 million and inked a deal with the CSN’s big brother: Comcast.
OneTwoSee worked with Comcast to develop Comcast’ new Major League Baseball app, which launches for X1 customers Tuesday. The app is a baseball nerd’s dream, filled with real-time stats, fantasy baseball data and post-game analysis. It features data visualizations, like spray charts, that baseball games show from time to time but with the new app, users can get it on demand and updated in real time.

Viewers can get stats on every single game, even if they don’t have the channels to watch it. They can also browse stats while watching another TV show. It’s another tactic to get subscribers to spend more time in front of the TV.
It’s the first time OneTwoSee’s app will be featured on a TV screen, rather than online. The app will reach at least five million X1 subscribers (that was the number of X1 subscribers back in October but it has since gone up, said spokeswoman Jennifer Bilotta).

OneTwoSee cofounder Chris Reynolds said the company always wanted to get its app in the “primary viewing space,” rather than online, but the technology just wasn’t there to support it.
OneTwoSee’s team worked with developers at Comcast’s Silicon Valley team, led by executive director of product management Preston Smalley, to build the app. It initially launched as an NFL app last fall, and Comcast was so pleased with the results that it “doubled down on OneTwoSee,” Smalley said. Comcast plans to re-launch the NFL app in the fall, as well as an NBA and NCAA app, among others.
Comcast would not disclose the nature of the deal but OneTwoSee is a software-as-a-service company, not an app development firm, so it wouldn’t be off-base to think of this as a subscription-based deal with Comcast.
It’s a big win for OneTwoSee, which has quietly grown from eight employees in 2012 to 15 in 2015. Reynolds said the team will soon grow to 20.
Though Comcast and its affiliates have been an integral part of OneTwoSee’s business so far, Reynolds said this wasn’t the big plan all along — he and Angelides didn’t found the company with a pointed goal of working with Comcast. Regardless, it seems like a model worth following for other Philly startups: capitalize on Comcast’s enormous reach and proximity.
For OneTwoSee, that proximity is almost immediate: The startup is located right across the street from Comcast HQ.