David Beckham Unicef charity match: Manchester United legend to livestream his return to Old Trafford on MyEye app
Beckham has a stake in MyEye, the British rival to live streaming apps Periscope and Meerkat
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Your support makes all the difference.David Beckham might just be hoping that Sir Alex Ferguson turns on the hairdryer treatment one last time when the pair share an Old Trafford dressing room on Saturday afternoon.
The all-star and sold out “Match for Children” gives the former England captain the chance to highlight not just the featured charity, UNICEF, for which he is a global ambassador, but to showcase his latest technology investment.
Beckham has a stake in MyEye, the British rival to live streaming apps such as Periscope and Meerkat, which allow users to broadcast video to the internet from their mobile phones. The behind-the-scenes footage he is due to shoot from Saturday’s Galactico-studded game could be a pivotal moment for the service.
In an interview with The Independent, the founders of MyEye said Beckham’s involvement was like “a royal seal of approval” for the technology.
Post-retirement, the football star is fast developing his experience as a broadcaster. His BBC film “David Beckham into the Unknown”, in which he rode a motorcycle through the Amazon rainforest, was an international hit. He has had cameos in recent feature films. The Old Trafford game is part of a seven-continent football odyssey which is being made into a BBC documentary.
It's like a royal seal of approval
The management team behind Brand Beckham are keen to position him as a modern adaptor of new media and his arrival on Instagram in May saw him attract 6m followers in a week, a record. His early films on MyEye, shot on his travels in Nepal, China and Dubai, show how he plans to use personal broadcasting to instantly connect with his global following.
Investment manager Paul Kavanagh had the idea for MyEye while attending “the world’s largest firework display” on New Year’s Eve 2013 in Dubai and wanting to share the experience with friends around the world. That would mean MyEye pre-dates the Twitter-owned Periscope and Meerkat, which were quicker to market, launching early this year. Kavanagh is not worried at missing the boat, noting that “less than 1 per cent” of a smartphone audience of 1 billion are streaming. “It’s still very early days,” he said.
MyEye was named and developed by Kavanagh’s friend of 20 years Mark Betteridge, who built the remarkable Rare games industry empire before selling up to Microsoft in 2002 for $375m. Like Rare, which worked closely with Nintendo and sold 110 million games with a total retail value of $5 billion, MyEye is based in the unlikely setting of the market town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire. “It’s above a cake shop,” said Betteridge, modestly describing an operation where 15 senior engineers are honing the MyEye user experience, drawing on lessons learned from the gaming sector.
Betteridge was travelling through the Midlands in the rain when Beckham “went live” from a car in Ho Chi Minh City after leaving a restaurant earlier this year. “He was holding the camera and then as the clip played you could hear people shouting and mopeds pipping,”he recalled. “David wound the window down and you could see his arm and there must have been 75 or 100 kids on motorbikes. He pulled up at the traffic lights and they were taking photographs of him and he was live streaming them and shaking hands. That was a two minute insight into his life.”
The athlete Mo Farah and the singer Natalie Imbruglia are among other stars to have embraced the service. So too has Beckham’s old teammate and Sky Sports pundit Gary Neville, who filmed from a holiday in Bali while dryly telling followers he was in Bolton. But Kavanagh acknowledges that “the US market is where we need to address” if the service is to challenge the likes of Periscope. MyEye is in talks with potential American celebrity ambassadors.
If the service is to succeed it needs the masses to supply their own user-generated content. MyEye, drawing on the “fun” element of gaming, differentiates from rivals with features including a graphic globe locator for each post and options to create sepia “Chaplin” effects. Films remain on the platform for 72 hours – which is longer than rivals – and can be shown only to select groups of followers, such as relatives or close friends. Emoji symbols are MyEye’s international language, which helps to limit trolling. A thumbs down symbol is as negative as it gets. “We wanted to make a safe environment,” said Betteridge.
Now MyEye needs Becks to capture some exclusive live footage which isn’t available to that other former England captain Gary Lineker, who will be featuring the game in “Match of the Day” highlights on BBC1 on Saturday.
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