Wicket Labs, a startup that is run by execs who are late of thePlatform, has raised a $2 million round of seed financing and has introduced a data-driven “Scorecard” product that can help OTT providers and other direct-to-consumer digital media companies keep tabs on key areas such as engagement, churn and customer-acquisition costs.

Wicket Labs said Madrona Venture Group, Divergent Ventures and undisclosed angel investors joined the $2 million round. It also announced the appointment of new members to its advisory board -- Krishan Bhatia, EVP of business operations and strategy for NBCUniversal’s ad sales unit; Dustin Hillard, CTO of Versive, a machine learning company based in Seattle; and Mike Berkley, previously SVP of product management for Viacom.

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In tandem with its partners, Wicket Labs’s new Scorecard product is designed to obtain data from various sources that are traditionally housed in separate silos and aggregate,  analyze and normalize that information into a form that can help to drive decisions that can aid with engagement, customer acquisition, conversion rates, and churn.

That combined and analyzed data can provide key predictive information about customers and audiences, Marty Roberts, CEO of Wicket Labs, explained.

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Roberts co-founded WicketLabs with chief strategy officer Ian Blaine, who also started thePlatform, the online video publishing company that Comcast acquired in 2006. Roberts joined thePlatform that year and eventually rose to co-CEO before departing in 2015.

Roberts said the data is particularly helpful to publishers who are transitioning from print to digital as well as a growing array of OTT video services, including authenticated TV Everywhere offerings from MVPDs and programmers, that continue to chip away at viewership of traditional TV.

Rather than relying on their gut feelings, data will help them make decisions and get a better fix on their audience, and how customers are coming through the door (i.e. through social media, digital ads, search, email) and get a better sense of their company’s value, Roberts said.

“They are all learning a new vocabulary,” he added.

Wicket Labs,  a Seattle-based startup that includes two former Comcast online video execs among its founders, has raised $2 million in funding, according to this SEC Form D filed Monday (June 5).

Last fall, Wicket Labs talked up a plan to help partners keep tabs on “mission critical” APIs and to therefore eliminate a “blind spot” associated with online video, but has been keeping quiet on its product strategy ever since.

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Wicket Labs’s site doesn’t delve deeply into the company’s product, but hints that the “effective use of data will be a decisive factor in determining the winners in the future of television” as the TV audience continues to become more fragmented amid time spent on social networks, personal devices and with OTT services.

“As veterans of cloud computing and the online video market, the team behind Wicket Labs is setting out on a new mission to level the playing field for media companies in an arena where data and insights drive winning strategies,” the site explains.

Wicket Labs is led by CEO Marty Roberts, the former co-CEO of thePlatform, the online video publish company that Comcast acquired in 2006 (now part of a unit called Comcast Technology Solutions), and an exec who is also late of RealNetworks.

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He’s joined by two other Wicket Labs co-founders: chief strategy officer Ian Blaine, a co-founder and former CEO of thePlatform who also served as SVP at Comcast’s Converged Products group, and VP of product Eric Knutson, who previously was senior director of operations at Rhapsody (which took on the Napster brand in 2016),  and a principal at North Highland Worldwide Consulting.

Claiming to bring vision to the video cloud’s “blind spot,” a vet from the premium OTT world is heading up Wicket Labs, a Seattle-based startup that will help its partners keep close tabs on what, it says, are “mission-critical” APIs.

Without proper monitoring, frequent changes in those third-party APIs can cause outages and other impairments for premium video applications, including TV Everywhere offerings and various direct-to-consumer apps and services, explained Wicket Labs CEO and co-founder Marty Roberts, who most recently was co-CEO of thePlatform, the online video publishing company that Comcast acquired in 2006, and is also late of RealNetworks.

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To address that issue, the startup has introduced the Wicket Scorecard, a service that keeps a close eye on ever-shifting third-party APIs that can impair an OTT service’s operations. He said API tracking can give partners a new level of visibility and enable them to more rapidly pinpoint API-related issues as they emerge.

Roberts said he and his team started to validate the idea by talking to several customers of thePlatform, noting that many have become increasingly reliant on cloud-based APIs but don’t’ have the personnel set up or their own monitoring systems to keep tabs on them, thus putting a heavier reliance on their vendors to handle many of those quality assurance aspects of their online video business.

Wicket Labs, he said, has built a core system that can call into these APIs and authenticate against them, or even validate them against a test environment prior to deployment.

The Wicket Scorecard uses a web and mobile user interface (UI) and alerts partners to the status of their Wickets based on three general categories: Good Wickets (shows a vendor’s API history and performance over time, including the number of times the API has entered a problem state); Notable Wickets (explain changes to an API that is not expected to cause an immediate or meaningful impact to the user experience); and Problem Wickets (details the issue and changes impacting the consumer experience and are presented for a timely escalation to the vendor) Problems in that latter category typically include outages, 500 or 503 errors, and “brown outs,” which can be attributed, for example, to an intermittent data error or a slow response time.  

Wicket Labs has not announced any individual partners, but Roberts said trials are underway and that the company’s initial group of targets includes premium video programmers, including broadcasters, cable operators or pure OTT providers.

“All of these companies have become increasingly dependent on cloud-based APIs, he said.

Starting today, Wicket Labs is offering free “friendly” summary account for up to three wickets before moving to a “Club” tier for five Wickets that costs $500 per month. A higher-end “League” tier is more variable in terms of the number of monitored Wickets are made available to the client.

Wicket Labs is currently privately funded, but could look to raise a formal “A” investment round next spring, Roberts said.

Other co-founders include VP of products Eric Knutson, formerly of RealNetworks and Rhapsody; and VP of software development Larry Hitchon, an exec who is late of Amazon, Front Desk, AppFog, and The Top Agent Network.