A tipping point has been reached in 2022, when the average daily time spent watching online video will surpass traditional TV time. There are an estimated 3.32 billion gamers worldwide, making up 41% of the world's population. Overplay Overplay merges these two worlds by combining video and casual gaming, allowing users to turn any online video into a casual video game without any coding knowledge. Users can upload videos from their smartphones to the AI-powered platform, which converts them into fun, lightweight, shareable, interactive and playable games within minutes. Overplay aims to unleash a new wave of game developers who have previously been unable to bring their ideas to market due to technical limitations. The business was featured on an episode of Shark Tank earlier this year and secured a $500,000 investment from Mark Cuban. Overplay is available on both Android and iOS on a freemium basis, with in-app purchases and subscriptions available for additional features and advanced customization.
Alley Watch An interview with Overplay's co-founder and CEO Caroline Strzalka To know more about the business, the company's strategic plans, and much more…
What products and services does Overplay offer?
Overplay is the first frictionless platform for user-generated games and is revolutionizing the $574 billion digital media industry. Overplay enables anyone to turn video into a game in minutes, with no code. Overplay enables limitless gameplay and game creation.
What is the difference?
Overplay's apps allow users to quickly and easily create games out of anything, from fun moments with friends to cat memes, cooking tutorials, extreme sports POVs, and more. Imagine the NBA making playable highlight reels, movie studios releasing trailers that are games, and car companies making commercials that let you virtually test drive their cars. Overplay's apps and licensable technology enable billions of creators, social media users, and brands to make their content interactive and increase audience engagement.
What is Overplay's target market and how big is it?
Overplay sits at the intersection of three huge markets: social media, video advertising and casual gaming. We are combining all the elements that make these markets successful into an innovative digital medium consumed and created by billions of potential Overplayers around the world.
Gaming is an untapped creative medium, opening up huge opportunities for creators, and Overplay allows over 200 million professional content creators around the world to leverage the videos they're already making and literally invite their fans into their worlds.
What is your business model?
Creating, sharing and playing games on Overplay is free for users. Our primary sources of revenue are advertising and licensing. Overplay apps also feature playable ads as native content.
The new capital injection will enable us to accelerate our API release schedule and bring our highly successful playable game ad format to thousands of brands. The Overplay API allows you to insert our technology into other apps and websites. We will monetize the API through a B2B SaaS licensing model. The potential to monetize our technology by supporting interactive playable game video ads is enormous.
What inspired you to start Overplay?
we, Sesame street So we created great interactive content for kids. We were always thinking about how we could expand and extend the reach of the content they shot. Plus, games are a hit business, so making games is expensive, time-consuming, and risky. One day, our CEO, Dan, was watching a POV mountain bike game and thought the video looked a lot like a game, so he wondered if we could make it into a game. He used his film know-how and self-taught programming experience to come up with a way for anyone to add light gaming elements to streaming video. Dan wrapped me up in it, and suddenly we realized that every creator, every TV or movie studio, every brand, every advertiser could easily create a game using this technology. Overplay could be the goose that lays the golden eggs.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
Creators (both professional and amateur) will continue to create and brands will continue to advertise no matter what the economy does, so we believe Overplay is somewhat invincible even if the economy slows down. Additionally, public (and nearly public) companies like Meta, Alphabet, Snap, and Canva are always looking to grow their audiences and user bases, so Overplay could be a great acquisition for them.
What milestones do you plan to achieve within the next 6 months?
Here is our roadmap:
What's one piece of startup advice you never received?
Getting your product into beta takes three times longer and costs three times more than you expected.
If you could reach out to anyone in the New York community, who would it be and why?
Mark LazarusChairman of NBCUniversal Media Group. Mark oversees all streaming, distribution and monetization across the company, and Overplay's technology has the potential to help take NBCUniversal's content to the next level. Imagine an interactive highlight reel from the just-concluded Olympics… or even before that, with athletes building excitement for the Olympics by posting games they created from their training sessions. Of course, maybe even interactive movie trailers, music videos and advertisements. Overplay has the power to transform NBCUniversal's content and really appeal to a younger generation that wants to interact with content in new, gamified ways.
Why did you launch in New York?
First, my co-founders and I were already based here! Second, we're a media platform and this is home to top media companies (especially sports and entertainment)! Third, there are only a few places in the US where you can raise venture funding, and New York is one of them.
What's your favorite restaurant in the city?
Numero 28 on Carmine Street – Best pizza in NYC!
