Screenreach Interactive: a sales, marketing and entertainment platform

We believe Screach is the future of customer communication and entertainment for venues such as pubs, retail shops, hotels and gyms – in fact, anywhere there are TVs and customers with smart phones. Screach can help these venues to increase customer satisfaction and drive sales.

We’re not a restaurant chain or ski manufacturer with an easy to understand concept – we’re a technology business, so please bear with us whilst we explain how we make a real difference…

Screach delivers a venue (such as a pub) their very own bespoke, intelligent TV channel via our Screach smart box that can turn under-utilised TVs into a powerful sales and marketing tool. This not only allows a venue to advertise food and drink offers and show interesting content to their customers (such as Premier League Highlights), but also has a smart element that uses data to dynamically influence the screen content and link to people’s mobiles to increase customer interactivity, which we believe makes the venue a more enjoyable place to visit.

So are we the only people who think that we can help? Fortunately not – we recently signed a 3 year agreement with BT, where Screach is now promoted as a value added service to over 24,000 BT Sport commercial customers. Screach can help these customers to get payback on the cost of their subscription sports package (currently costing pubs over an estimated £500m per year!).

Since the BT launch, over 2,200 venues have signed up to have Screach TV installed within only 3 months. 1,100 venues already have a Screach Box installed, with a further 1,100+ venues in the pipeline. During this period, we have also signed a six figure advertising deal, as Screach TV can also show third party adverts just like normal terrestrial TV and Sky.

To get us to this point we’ve had amazing support from a group of investors who believe in what we can deliver, including venture capital firm Northstar Venture as well as highly successful individuals including:

• Tom Maxfield – former Director of Sage plc
• Colin Willis – founder of Hotspur Capital
• Mark I’Anson MBE – Director of Venture Capital company NF Holdings Ltd
• Sir Peter Vardy – former CEO of Reg Vardy plc
• Alistair Arkley CBE – founder of New Century Inns and former CEO of Century Inns plc, and
• Brian Lowe – former Director of New Century Inns and Century Inns plc.

Your investment in Screach will be used to capitalise on our growth opportunity, with our initial focus on the 48,000+ UK pub market^[15] where we estimate there are 150,000 under-utilised TVs.^[16]

We fundamentally believe that Screach is a very exciting product with clear market applicability, that will return significant value to our investors.

Our story

Screach was conceived as an idea in 2009 when a small group of techies (including our CTO, Sorin, and Head of Product, Dave) identified that more and more TVs were being installed in venues (especially pubs), and more and more people had smart phones. However, they identified little or no focus on how these things could be combined to increase customers’ enjoyment and satisfaction.

• We should probably also mention at this point that our team are ‘enthusiastic’ pub goers who believe pubs are vital to our culture and community. Subsequently, we developed a particular passion for wanting to help pubs survive and thrive, especially as they’ve been having such a tough time of late.

Over the following 5 years (with no shortage of white board sessions and late night programming marathons), we built a cloud-based, content delivery platform, which allows us to display content on potentially any TV in any venue, anywhere in the world, using a Screach smart box installed in the venue.

We believe the £3.7 million investment so far has ensured robust testing of the product in a real world environment in order to deliver what it was designed to do – we see our BT agreement and existing customers as testament to this.  

Subsequently, we added sales and marketing people to our team and soft launched Screach TV into the market in early 2014. We’ve since added the Screach App, Screach Music, and the soon to be launched Screach Wifi to offer venues a dynamic, integrated and totally unique solution.

As well as our ever growing base of independent pub customers, we are now proud to count large organisations such as Marstons plc^[24] and Walkabout as customers, as well as companies in different vertical markets such as Schuh retail stores and Aspers Casinos.

Due to the success of our new BT relationship, we now hope to attract additional investment to ensure that we seize the growth opportunity in front of us.