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A Sydney-based start-up is helping venues track sports events and where they will be broadcast with a data-aggregating scheduling platform.

The Sportsyear platform simplifies live sports planning for venues, replacing hospitality venues having to sift through the hundreds of games, tournaments and championships that are broadcast each week.

Co-founded by UNSW Business School alumni, Patrick Galloway, the platform is currently used by more than 100 hospitality venues - including Merivale, Solotel and The Star, Sydney.

Galloway told the UNSW website “managing the live sport schedule for a venue is a problem that everybody in the hospitality industry finds extremely painful.

“Just sourcing the information takes hours each week.”

In the past, sports broadcasting was the domain of the public broadcasters – ABC and SBS. With the increase in cost of broadcast rights for popular sports, other market players stepped in.

Today, live sport is fragmented across hundreds of broadcasters.

Sportsyear tracks the who, what and when of sport by aggregating data to automate scheduling.

Venue owners can build their own custom live sport schedule that resonates with their particular demographic.

Galloway advises “we save venue operators three to four hours each week.

“We help them attract more sports fans with accurate, engaging and informative live sport promotions on their website.”

Galloway said his background as a sports media professional certainly helped business. The UNSW graduate is a sports journalist at ABC News and his Sportsyear co-founder, Daniel Giorelando, is an editorial manager at Fox Sports.

He adds “there were a few changes happening in the sports landscape and we were able to see it up close because we were working in the sports media.”

Sportsyear first launched in 2003 with a print diary detailing the key sport events of the year. Sales of the print diary peaked at 10,000, but after going digital, the co-founders quickly realised that sports fans weren’t the main users.

The turning point was when the venue manager at Palace Hotel Mort Lake, called the co-founders.

Galloway advised “Bill said he loved what we’d built.

“We realised we stumbled upon a big opportunity. There is a problem in hospitality in Australia specifically around planning in live sport.

“We started out thinking our product would be for sports fans and were surprised to discover we were solving a problem for a different type of customer.”

With Australians watching more than 60 million hours of sport a week - and many planning their lives around matches – Sportsyear makes it easy for venues to cater for the demands of this market.

Images: Sportsyear in use (top) and Patrick Galloway (below). Courtesy of UNSW.

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