LiveLike Converts Passive Users into Active Fans
LiveLike focuses on transforming how digital audiences engage with content—especially live content like sports, entertainment, news, and events. Its core mission is to convert passive users into active fans by giving them interactive, social, and gamified tools to participate in what they’re watching, rather than just consuming it.
LiveLike offers a suite of customizable widgets and engagement tools. These include interactive widgets (polls, quizzes, emoji sliders, etc.), informative widgets (alerts, promotions, deal notifications), live chat features including influencer or public chats, and loyalty and rewards programs with points, badges, and leaderboards.
LiveLike is used by media companies, sports leagues, broadcasters, and other organizations that want to increase user engagement, retention, and monetize their platforms in new ways. Live events such as the Super Bowl, World Cup, and the NBA Playoffs have used LiveLike’s SDK and tools to let fans interact, make predictions, participate in watch parties, engage with social components, and so on.
The company also helps its partners collect first-party or zero-party data about behavior and preferences, which can improve personalization, sponsorship metrics, and content strategy. Its tools are flexible, modular, and customizable in branding and form, integrated via SDKs or APIs for web, mobile, etc., and are intended to be efficient to set up.
LiveLike is at the forefront of applying artificial intelligence to fan engagement. Its Genie multi-agent AI assistant embeds directly into the LiveLike CMS, enabling editors, marketers, product managers, and analysts to work in sync through natural-language prompts. Genie automates the creation, scheduling, and analysis of interactive widgets—reducing production time from hours to minutes—while coordinating across multiple “agents” that mirror real team roles. By turning AI into a real-time collaborator rather than a back-end utility, LiveLike is redefining what scalable, personalized fan engagement can look like.
LiveLike serves multiple industries beyond sports—such as FinTech, entertainment, e-commerce, publishing — and aims to democratize access to these engagement features so more platforms can bring live or dynamic content to life. Miheer Walakavar, CEO and Co-Founder of LiveLike spoke recently with Tripp Baltz, Head of Research for Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech, powered by Boomtown Innovation.
TRIPP:
Thanks for joining us today.
MIHEER:
Pleasure to be with you.
TRIPP:
Why don’t we begin with the arc of your career. How did you get started, before LiveLike?
MIHEER:
I grew up in India and studied engineering there. I then went to Georgia Tech for my Masters, studying electrical and computer engineering. I’ve always been passionate about technology.
After graduating, I wanted to learn a little bit more about the world of finance and how businesses operate. So I got a job in investment banking on Wall Street. I worked in M&A and equities markets for two years. Then I switched to the buy side where I was with a hedge fund for two years.
After that, I had an entrepreneurial itch, so I moved back to India, where a friend of mine had started an education technology company as a passion project. I thought it was really interesting – it was marrying technology and education. When I moved back, I set up the operations in India because that was one of the core target markets for us. That was my first foray into the world of entrepreneurship.
It was a social enterprise, so it was a really fun project, and I learned a lot about building companies from scratch. After doing that for a few years, I spoke with one of my close friends from my banking days, who had invested in a sports startup in France. I’ve always been a very passionate sports fan. He asked me if I would be interested in taking over the business.
This was an amazing opportunity to move to Paris and learn about the business of sports. And that’s how LiveLike was born – it came out of a passion for sports, and what comes next in the world of sports fandom, sports viewership, and sports consumption.
We formally started LiveLike in 2015 with that idea.
TRIPP:
Excellent. Please explain the problem you are trying to solve.
MIHEER:
Livelike is a B2B company, and our job is to help our partners, which could be a league, a team, or a media company in sports. We’re trying to help our partners figure out what the next generation of sports consumption and sports fandom look like, and how do we monetize that fandom?
And so on one hand, we are constantly looking at what the new consumption patterns are. Over the last decade, that’s changed quite a bit. For example, we have gone from passive, lean-back viewing on ESPN in the evenings to now always-on, active, leaned-in type of consumption.
People care about fantasy and predictions and pick-and-play and, and everything has become more of a social experience. With the advent of social networks, Reddit, Twitter, and Twitch, fans want to participate as much as they want to consume sports.
So what we specialize in is figuring out those best practices from everywhere around the world and bringing that into the world of sports viewership.
What we do is provide software for our partners to drive gamification, to drive communities, to drive engagement and participation on their own. This in effect helps them monetize and get to know their fans better.
With the cable bundle going away, you suddenly have to worry about churn and time spent, and all of these factors that sports rightsholders never needed to care about. Before, you sold your rights to a broadcaster, the broadcaster got affiliate fees from cable distributors, and everyone was happy.
You know, the bundle was fat and healthy, and the economics worked. But once that bundle started crumbling and we moved from cable and broadcast viewing to OTT and YouTube TV and those types of platforms, suddenly user experience started making a huge difference to a business’s operations.
That’s where we excel the most. We are helping our partners create that next-generation user experience and bring in all the other elements that have surrounded the world of sports viewing – fantasy gaming, gamification, betting – all into one cohesive user experience.
TRIPP:
The sports business is becoming more and more about delivering that full consumer relationship, right?
MIHEER:
Exactly. It’s end-to-end. Everything from top of the funnel – how do you acquire these consumers into your subscription service – to then focusing on how you convert them into year-long fans.
You might have fans that are NFL fans, and the question is how you make them a multichannel fan so that they stay on even when the NFL is in its off-season. Retention, churn, predictions, all of that. It’s become a very sophisticated operation now from a digital standpoint.
TRIPP:
Describe who your partners are – media organizations, teams, leagues? Who are they in general?
MIHEER:
We service all of them, actually. A lot of international broadcasters, and increasingly more within the Comcast ecosystem. We are starting to work with Sky Sports and Xfinity, etc. On the property side, we work with MLB, NBA, Serie A clubs. The Golden State Warriors, PSG Football Club, Chelsea Football Club, New York Mets – the list goes on.
Our tools are agnostic to content and genre, so they also work with financial institutions and casinos. But our core bread and butter is, has always been media, sports and entertainment.
TRIPP:
Describe who is out there in the marketplace doing anything similar to what you’re doing.
MIHEER:
There are three core pillars to what we do. There is the world of engagement and interactivity. The second pillar is community social. So like Twitch in a box, Reddit in a box. And the third is gamification. So that’s more like Duolingo in a box, right? Streaks, badges, tiers, mechanics.
If you think about it, if you think about those three things as isolated three pillars, we have competitors in each of those pillars. You know, I would consider us one of a kind in the media world, but there are others that provide community solutions. So we definitely compete with all of them in individual categories there.
But I would struggle to name one competitor that can do all three of those things right, the way we do.
TRIPP:
How did you decide to apply to the Comcast SportsTech program?
MIHEER:
Livelike had been looking at the Comcast Sports tech program for the past few years, frankly. We’ve worked within the Comcast ecosystem in the past with Sky Sports and NBC.
But as the program evolved, it never seemed like the right timing, and then this year, it was a perfect fit. When the program started, it was focused on early-stage companies, but we were further along at that time. We weren’t a quote-startup-unquote anymore.
When the focus shifted from early-stage to growth-stage companies that had immediate applicability across all of the business units within the Comcast ecosystem, it seemed like a match made in heaven for us.
What it meant for us is getting access to business units that, candidly, I didn’t even know existed. From the Comcast SportsTech standpoint, everything that LiveLike had done and achieved to this date was relevant.
It’s not like we were getting into an accelerator program for LiveLike. It felt more like an accelerator program for the partners, designed to drive innovation within the Comcast SportsTech ecosystem.
Some of the other companies in the 2025 class have all been in a similar stage of growth as us. Not all of them, but some of them have definitely been at a similar stage of growth, or even more advanced than us.
TRIPP:
What has been your favorite thing so far about the program?
MIHEER:
I really think it’s been well-structured. Everything from the matchmaking that was done with a commercial advisor to helping us stay focused on the right businesses to focus on. As a startup founder, it’s easy to want to chase every single deal.
We’ve met with around 12 to 15 businesses as part of the program, but not every business is the right fit for us. So the fact that we were paired up with the right businesses, which allowed us to stay focused and go deeper with the right partners for LiveLike, I think, has been extremely good because otherwise it can easily be overwhelming.
TRIPP:
Wrapping up here, what major trends do you see coming for sports tech in the next 12 to 24 months?
MIHEER:
Over the next two years, we’ll be moving into an era where AI becomes less of an ‘on the bench’ player and more of an active teammate in creating fan experiences that actually matter.
Right now, what we’re seeing at leagues, teams and federations is internal teams working in silos – one group editorial, another runs marketing campaigns, and the analytics team works separately from everyone else.
But imagine if all of that could work together seamlessly. AI can make that happen, helping teams move faster, cut through the busy work, and create experiences that feel personal in ways we’ve never seen before.
Here’s one practical example. Instead of a fan getting the same generic push notification as millions of other fans, they could receive something crafted just for them, based on the specific game they’re watching, the community they’re part of, and where they are in your journey as a fan. Maybe they’re a newcomer who needs context, or a diehard who wants the deep stats. AI can recognize that and respond accordingly.
It’s not just about better technology. It’s about freeing up the creative minds in sports to focus on what they do best while AI handles the coordination and personalization.
In an industry where emotions run high and every moment counts, that kind of seamless collaboration between human creativity and intelligent systems will completely transform how fans connect with the teams and leagues they love.