Medal.tv, a video clipping service for gamers, enters the livestreaming market with Rawa.tv acquisition – TechCrunch
Medal. Tv, a short-form video clipping service and social network for gamers are entering the live-streaming market with the acquisition of Rawa. Tv, a Twitch rival based in Dubai, has raised around $1 million. The seven-figure, all-cash deal will see two of Rawa’s founders, Raya Dadah and Phil Jammal, now joining Medal and further integrations between the two platforms in the future. The Middle East and North African region (MENA) are one of the fastest-growing markets in gaming and still one that’s mainly uncatered to explain Medal.
Tv CEO Pim de Witte, his company’s interest in Rawa. “Most companies that target that market don’t understand the nuances and try to replicate existing Western or Far-Eastern models doomed to fail,” he said. “Absorbing a local team will increase Medal’s chances of success here. Overall, we believe that MENA is an underserved market without a clear leader in the live streaming space. Rawa brings to Medal the local market expertise that we need to capitalize on this opportunity,” de Witte added.
Medal. The exec also noted that the TV community had been asking to do live streaming for some time. Still, de Witte said the technology would have been too expensive for the startup to build using off-the-shelf services at its scale. “People increasingly connect around live and real-time experiences, and this is something our platform has lacked to date,” he noted. But Rawa, as the first live streaming platform dedicated to Arab gaming, had built its own proprietary live and network streaming technology now used in all its products. That technology is now coming to Medal. Tv.
Tv and some Rwa partners had joined Medal’s skilled player program. The two companies were already connected today, as Rawa users uploaded their gaming clips to Medal. The company says that Rawa will continue to operate as a separate platform, but it will become more tightly integrated with Medal. Currently, Rawa sees around 100,000 active users on its service. The remaining Rawa team will continue to operate the live-streaming platform under co-founder Jammal’s leadership following the deal’s close, and the Rawa HQ will remain based in Dubai. However, Rawa’s employees have been working remotely since the start of the pandemic, it’s unclear if that will change in the future, given the uncertainty of Covid-19’s spread.
Medal. Tv detailed its further plans for Rawa on its site, where the company explained it doesn’t aim to build a “general-purpose” livestreaming platform where most viewers don’t pay — a call-out that seems aimed at Twitch. Instead, it will focus on matching content with viewers interested in subscribing to the creators. This addresses one of the challenges that larger platforms like Twitch have faced,hasre it’s been difficult for smaller streamers to get off the ground.
The company also said it would remain narrowly focused on serving the gaming community instead of venturing into non-gaming content, as others have done. Again, this differentiates itself from Twitch, which expanded into vlogs and even streaming old TV shows over the years. And it’s much different from YouTube or Facebook Watch, where gaming is only a subcategory of a broader video network. The acquisition follows Medal. Tv’s $9 million Series A led by Horizons Ventures in 2019 after the startup had grown to 5 million registered users and “hundreds of thousands” of daily active users. Today, the company says over 200,000 people create content daily on Medal, and 3 million users actively view that content every month.
