Kiswe Mobile
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| Private | |
| Industry | Mobile applications, sports media |
| Founded | Autumn 2013 |
| Founder |
Jeong Kim (Chair) Wim Sweldens (President and CEO) Jimmy Lynn (Vice-President) |
| Headquarters | Murray Hill, New Jersey; Bethesda, Maryland, United States |
| Products | Mystics Live, KISWE app |
| Website | kiswe.com |
Kiswe Mobile is a startup company that makes mobile applications for watching sports. Its applications feature multiple-camera streaming of sporting events as they happen to mobile devices, where the user then has interactive control over what they choose to see.
The company was started in autumn 2013. Its three founders are Jeong Kim, an engineer and former president of Bell Labs; Wim Sweldens, a scientist and innovator in communications and signal processing who had been at Alcatel-Lucent; and Jimmy Lynn, a former sports executive with AOL. During its stealth mode period, Kim said the new venture was at the juncture of next-generation Web technology and sports and said that their "secret sauce" was the technology to allow interactive video to be applied to sports. Kim's initial goals were for $1 million in funding.
The first substantial use of Kiswe technology came in May 2014 in the Women's National Basketball Association, when the Washington Mystics began testing the Mystics Live application. Mystics Live is a free mobile application that allows users view the team's home games live on their smartphone or tablet, choosing among the broadcast feed or five alternate camera angles, triggering replays from any of those angles, and showing real-time statistics. It can be used both by fans at the game or by those not at the game but within a 75-mile (121 km) radius.
While there are similar mobile applications for in-arena use, such as Cisco and WillowTree's StadiumVision for the National Basketball Association team the Brooklyn Nets, the content is not accessible once one leaves the venue's Wi-Fi network. The Mystics thus became the first U.S. professional sports team to stream live games to the whole local viewing area via such a mobile application.Ted Leonsis, owner of the Mystics and its Monumental Network digital platform, said Mystics Live would enhance the in-arena experience for the team's fans and in general better engage and reach the mobile generation. (Kiswe co-founder Kim is a partner in Monumental Sports & Entertainment, the group that Leonsis heads.) The WNBA was an effective vehicle for the application because the league is more open to new business ventures and because there are no entrenched regional sports networks paying rights fees to carry Mystics games who would object to a local streaming service. Manish Tripathi, a professor of marketing at Emory University, said "That's why a team like the Mystics can go out and do this, there's no contractual issues."
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