LIV, one of the most popular virtual reality streaming companies in the game, has secured $2.6 million in a Series A financing round. This is something the company will be using to expand their development team, advance their current streaming software and tech, and hopefully integrate more third-party game studios to the process.
This Series A funding was led by Hiro Capital, one of the newer names in streaming and inside of virtual reality. Hiro is a streaming-focused company that was founded and led by Inspired Entertainment co-founder Luke Alvarez, Games Workshop co-founder Ian Livingstone CBE, and Cherry Freeman, co-founder of LoveCrafts. This is a group that clearly wants to not only see virtual reality succeed but to see LIV succeed in their climb to the top of virtual reality streaming.
LIV has had a tremendous amount of success in the funding process. They completed a Venture Round earlier this year in the summer, and raked in a solid $1 million at the end of that investment series. The main investors in their previous round was Seedcamp, Techstars, Credo Ventures, HTC Vive, Jaroslav Beck from Beat Games, and the Oculus co-founder and one of the inventors of the Oculus Rift, Palmer Luckey. Seedcamp and Credo Ventures both participated in the latest series of investments as well, helping Hiro Capital get $2.6M.
If you are unfamiliar with the software that LIV is pushing to finish, we will give a small refresher. This tech puts you, the player, into the virtual world for the streamers to see. If you are playing Asgard’s Wrath, you can be represented in a virtual space. So instead of your viewers seeing your view out of the headset, they will be able to see what the gameplay would look like if they were to be there inside of the game watching you. This is some new tech that isn’t completely finished, but this funding is helping get there.
“The tools used for broadcasting traditional PC games couldn’t show the intensity of what we were experiencing as players” says AJ Shewki, CEO and co-founder of LIV. “In VR, your body is the controller and that’s part of the magic. As a player, you are fully immersed in VR, but unless we can show the player’s body interacting with their VR environment, the 2D stream audience is missing out. And that’s how we got started — we wanted to level up the VR spectator experience.”
This is the perfect way to put it. The game doesn’t seem nearly as intense when viewing on a desktop screen and not through the lens. The next best way to present this to the stream viewers is with the ability to view the stream from a third party. If and when LIV figures this tech out completely, it is going to change the VR streaming game forever. On top of that, if they could implement this with other non-VR PC games, the value of the software would also boom.
This tech is still far away from being in everyone’s hands, but it is well on their way to becoming a common feature for virtual reality. For more VR news and community updates, make sure to check back at VRGear.com.
