Diddo Brings Shopping to Video on All Screens
Diddo is an innovative tech startup that enables shopping directly from video content. Its platform empowers streaming services, TV, video owners , and media owners to integrate seamless native e-commerce capabilities, so viewers can buy what they see without leaving their experience.
Diddo, a member of the 2025 cohort of Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech, provides an API that streaming platforms and broadcasters can integrate into their video players. The tech uses proprietary AI-powered computer vision to identify products in TV shows, live sports, advertisements, or movies and turns them into clickable, interactive shopping options.
The tech doesn’t require viewers to scan QR codes, and it doesn’t redirect them to separate screens. Diddo keeps the shopping experience immersive and entirely within the content—eliminating friction for viewers. It processes videos using AI just once—creating a time-stamped index of products—so there’s no heavy live processing required on the viewer’s device nor are there any rights issues in their proprietary flow.
At any point during a show or event, users can access an interactive storefront within the platform and complete their purchase via a direct integration with millions of retailers’ order management systems. Diddo also collects data on viewer interactions to power recommendations.
Sometimes likened to “Stripe for video,” Diddo’s goal is to embed commerce natively into media, unlocking a new monetization frontier while transforming media into the customer’s shopping journey. The company has signed deals with several platforms including Dailymotion, Mux, the Highlights App, and fashion brand Blair New York.
Tripp Baltz, Head of Research for Boomtown Innovation, which powers Comcast SportsTech, interviewed Rishi Nair, who founded Diddo in late 2022 with Ryan Sullivan and Pamela Chen.
TRIPP:
Thanks for giving us your time.
RISHI:
Happy to do it.
TRIPP:
Why don’t you tell us, first of all, Rishi, what is your career arc? How did you get started?
RISHI:
Yeah, we’re a relatively young team and young company as well. We actually got the company started in college. I’m originally from the Bay Area, and when Covid-19 happened my freshman year of college, we had the very unique experience of having a lot of time during college. The entirety of sophomore year for me was online.
Ryan and I were just tinkering around with a bunch of different things because we were living on the West Coast while we were doing school on the East Coast. We had school from 5 a.m. until 10 a.m. and then had the rest of the day to do whatever we wanted to do, which was great.
We had a lot of time to just explore and feel things out. And that’s where our entrepreneurial journey started. We had a couple different ideas that we were working with, including Diddo, which we started at the beginning of our senior year. We’ve been off to the races since then.
TRIPP:
What was the light bulb moment for Diddo, the moment you realized there was a problem you could solve?
RISHI:
Honestly, we started it to solve a problem for our moms, who are huge fans of “Selling Sunset” and social media. They were calling us all the time and asking us about the items and products they were seeing in the show. Obviously Ryan and I had no idea what was on screen, so we built them a product that would be able to tell them what was on the screen. At first we did it so the calls from our moms would end (laughs).
But then we launched it in the New York City college communities, and we observed a great number of people wanted it. And being in New York, we had great access to a lot of entertainment companies in the area.
After speaking with them, we realized that this really wasn’t a new issue. This was something that people have always wanted. So we just went heads down and focused on the pain points because I think we went about things a little bit differently than the normal startup.
It wasn’t about quick iterations. It was about, “Here’s a huge problem that has been a problem since before the Internet existed.” We really focused on all of those pain points.
We were also very fortunate that at the time we started there were advancements in AI and in tech that allowed us to create a technology that answered a lot of questions that our predecessors couldn’t have answered, and which didn’t address a lot of the pain points of these larger companies.
TRIPP:
How would you describe the chief pain point you’re addressing?
RISHI:
We can split it into two big things. First and foremost are rights issues on the media side. The media companies will never send you their content, and like a normal computer vision company, you want to be able to store the content, you want to be able to deal with the content to see what’s on screen and have that be in your ecosystem.
If we go to Comcast NBCUniversal and ask for the release of Wicked 2 before it’s released, the answer is a pretty quick no. And so that was a huge pain point on the rights issue for why this couldn’t have existed in a scalable manner because people would then just do manual selection of things so that they didn’t have to do the computer vision aspect, but it’s just not a scalable opportunity.
So that was a big part there. Then the second side of it, it was really hard for this to be something that worked for retailers, given all the complexities. It’s a reason that a lot of these companies just straight up are not retail companies. Very few media companies also have a really strong retail arm.
It’s just a headache to deal with merchant-of-record issues and connectivity issues on the retail side. We really just focus on making sure that we could answer those questions and have it connect in a seamless fashion to the entertainment and rights issue side as well, to make sure that what is a very complex issue becomes as easy and intuitive as everyone thinks that it should be.
TRIPP:
How would you articulate the chief thing you’re delivering to the end consumer?
RISHI:
I think what we do is monetize culture. Culture starts from what you see on screen, whether it’s the release of Wicked 2, or reality TV shows on Bravo or sports … everything starts from what you see on screen.
We’ve seen countless companies capture what you see on screen and continue to build upon that. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to collapse that entire funnel, right now.
Let’s say you’re watching Succession and you see an incredible hat on screen, before us you had to first go find what that hat is. Then you have to go to that specific story, make sure it’s not sold out, and then go through two or three different clicks to get through a purchase. Even after you find the actual item, it’s a lot of steps.
With us, if I see a hat, you’ll be able to purchase it in the moment. That’s what we want to do. We want to remove all of the countless steps that are currently in the purchasing journey.
TRIPP:
I would imagine that all those steps are potential failure opportunities, a lot of cracks in the pavement for the consumer to fall through. It sounds like Diddo is shortening the journey by removing those failure points.
RISHI:
Exactly. And we’re seeing incredible rates of success with testing. We’ve done test runs on a lot of different reality TV shows. For example, when Bravo ran Shoppable Ecosystems, they saw a 30% higher conversion rate than their standard ecommerce flows. And that’s really interesting because the current purchase journeys are non-emotional journeys.
The way ecommerce works right now, there is no emotion compared to when you’re in a physical store. Looking at an item and envisioning it on you, that’s emotional. That’s the connection you’re being able to derive from that piece.
When you’re seeing it on screen in a show, you have the emotions of seeing it on someone. You’re seeing it in a real life context. When you’re seeing stock images on a website, there’s no emotional connection. It’s more of just a transaction.
We want to bring the emotion to the digital side that doesn’t exist today.
TRIPP:
Meaning a customer in a store is engaged because they’re there physically, maybe even sharing that experience with a friend or relative … got it. Can you tell us a little bit about your clients? Who are the customers you are working with?
RISHI:
We’re working with customers who want us as the back-end plumbing that turns a show or a sports broadcast into a shoppable ecosystem. If you own media and you work with media, you’re our target client.
TRIPP:
Are you collaborating with other members of the SportsTech consortium?
RISHI:
100%. We’re already in conversations with them to see what things we can do. Shoppable ads are going to be absolutely enormous. We’re seeing an 8.5 times increase in return on ad spend of shoppable ads.
TRIPP:
Are you working with agentic AI?
RISHI:
What we do already presents some really interesting agent cases. In the future, we’ll have one agent do the entire end-to-end process. I don’t think we’ll be involved in any agent-to-agent communication. We want to have a very streamlined approach that we can make as secure as possible. We are a company that is very focused on trust and very focused on security.
And we’re going to obviously be the most technologically advanced company to be able to do so, which we’ve seen from our track record and is a big reason that Comcast is an investor in us.
TRIPP:
Can you tell us why you decided to apply to Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech?
RISHI:
Yeah, I mean honestly, we had an angel from our last round who introduced us to program staff. It’s just an incredible opportunity to be able to work with someone like Comcast this early in our company lifecycle. It’s actually company-changing. We can’t even fathom just how much it’s changed what we’ve been able to do.
We’re now in a position where we can go after the white whales, which is just amazing, being a company of our size. It’s a testament to our team, but it’s also a huge testament to how Comcast and the other consortium companies run their processes to continue to bring alongside a lot of innovation in a way that makes sense for them.
TRIPP:
Which partners are you working with?
RISHI:
We’re doing a lot of really cool stuff with Xfinity, and we have some pretty cool launch ideas for NBC Sports. Outside of that, we’re working closely with the NBC team on a lot of their fast channel distribution capabilities, as well as a lot of their shoppable ad units.
TRIPP:
What’s been the best experience for you so far?
RISHI:
I mean, just being able to see how the game is played, to learn how everything works on a company level, has been incredible. The internal day-to-day at Diddo is so different from what these big companies are doing.
Outside of that, it’s been great to learn from the other companies in the cohort. We’ve picked up a ton from every single company, what they’ve done in the past and what they’re currently doing in their companies, especially from Bo Han at Transmit Live. It’s been instrumental in both our company and also my personal growth. It’s hard to even commodify anything there.
TRIPP:
Who would you say are your competitors?
RISHI:
That’s a pretty common VC question for us as well. The way we went about this was not like a normal startup space. So we’re not really looking at competitors in the normal sort of sense of that world. This is a “rising tide lifts all ships” sort of market.
And it’s such a nascent market. There’s just so much scar tissue in this space. People wanted shoppable TV for so long and there’s so many things that haven’t worked, so there’s a sense that this is also not going to work. Being able to work with Comcast helps be a counterpoint to that kind of pushback.
What we’ve always been about is, we’re going to create a product that feels luxurious at every single step of the way. From the consumer who’s purchasing an item to the media partner that’s integrating our API to the retailer that’s seeing an uptick in purchases. We’re obsessive about how the product feels at every single touch point.
So we don’t think about the competition because we’re very focused on our customers. We also know that the way we’re going about our business, the way that we’re able to work with both media players like Comcast as well as hardware players in the CTV (connected TV) space, as well as the massive retail companies, that it does build a very strong moat.
TRIPP:
Talk a bit about the future of sports and media. What do you see coming in the next 2-3 years?
RISHI:
So much. Advertising and CTV ad spend is going to be massive. Ad spend right now has kind of just been crushed. We’re seeing a couple big social media companies that are able to really continue to grow, such as YouTube and the Metas of the world.
A lot of that has to do with user personalization. Figuring out how a lot of these different companies are able to monetize a lot of their content because sports rights are just expensive and we’ve seen NBC spend a lot of money in this space. Their NBA deal is not a cheap deal by any means.
So being able to monetize that in a way that makes sense for them, in a way that the returns are going to make those numbers make sense is always going to be a huge push as well.
Another trend: coming up with different ways to include the audience. We’ve seen a lot of great social media companies like Twitch and all that have a bunch of creators that come into the space and allow that connectivity to a younger audience in a way that isn’t so buttoned up as it was in the past with normal sports commentators.
That’s really interesting and I think that that’s going to be a massive opportunity in this space.
TRIPP:
Drill down on what you mean by personalization.
RISHI:
The first answer that comes to mind is, “Are people less interested in sports?” On the whole, I’d say no. I think people are more interested in sports than ever. But there are so many different ways people can watch sports, and it’s not exactly friendly to the consumer.
Companies like YouTube TV are coming along to try and fix that, which is basically creating a digital cable again. But a big thing in this space is how do you make it easier for the customer to watch a game in a way that makes sense with rights issues. For example, the NBA wasn’t making as much money when it was bundled and easier to watch, but the audience was, I would say, a lot more into what happened on the day to day.
Fan engagement numbers should pull in what people are watching on conventional outlets, but also Twitch, Tik Tok, even StreamEast and pirated avenues as well. Those are the shadow numbers, and the monetization of stuff like that is incredibly important. The NBA is making a ton of money right now, but the fan experience is not what it should be. How do we fix that? I think rebundling is going to be a big part of that.
TRIPP:
It seems like every game, every match, every sport competition in the world is on TV somewhere, but it’s harder to watch your local team.
RISHI:
It’s crazy that StreamEast and other apps that are completely pirated are a sure-shot way to always watch your team.
TRIPP:
Is there a particular brand or startup that you’re keeping your eye on?
RISHI:
The ESPN direct-to-consumer approach is going to be really interesting to watch. ESPN is such a huge brand. With NBC, they kind of control sports. Amazon and Netflix are getting in there, but they just don’t have that brand cachet.