Eyal Arad and the Fans Hiding in Plain Sight

A sports fan uploads a video. Somewhere, an executive has to decide whether to send a complaint or a thank-you. Eyal Arad has spent years building a business around the information that makes that decision possible. His company can recognize video as it travels across social media. The more interesting discovery was what the people sharing it might be worth to the people who owned it.

Arad co-founded Videocites in 2014. It developed video-search technology with an obvious commercial application: helping content owners find unauthorized copies. In January 2026, the company became Ripple Analytics. Between those two names lies a change in perspective, from following the copy to understanding the audience around it. For a founder trained in electrical engineering, the picture became a route into a much less orderly subject: human enthusiasm.

An engineer learns to follow the picture

Arad’s route into sports technology began well away from the sponsorship deck. He studied electrical engineering at the Technion from 1996 to 2000, then electro-optics at Tel Aviv University from 2005 to 2007. His professional background includes research and development management across electronics, electro-optics and semiconductors. Before social video became his business, systems engineering was already part of his working vocabulary.

He also had experience starting a company. From 2011 to 2014, he was co-founder and CEO of eMotion Technologies. During that period he returned to the Technion for an MBA, studying from 2012 to 2014. He founded its MBA Entrepreneurship Club. The MBA had an extracurricular project with an appropriately literal name.

Ripple’s own account of its beginnings goes back to a business-school thesis. The company was founded in 2014 by Arad, Aviad Louzon, Michael Bronstein and Ze’ev Ganor. That combination of academic work and company formation matters to the story: Arad was bringing technical experience into a commercial question that was still taking shape.

The search engine used visual fingerprints to recognize video. A copy could be shortened, resized or otherwise altered and still be discoverable. Following pictures offered a different route from following the words people happened to attach to them. A fan did not have to write a useful caption for the video itself to supply a clue.

The decision after the match

Recognition created a useful result, but it did not settle the next question. A rights holder might want an unauthorized broadcast removed. It might have a very different response to a creator whose short clip brought the sport to another audience. The same search capability could serve both situations. What changed was the instruction that followed.

“The rights holder has to make the ultimate decision,” Arad said in 2023. He explained that each media company has its own policy. That puts a limit on what an algorithm can decide by finding a match. Knowing where a video appears gives an organization a basis for action; it still has to choose what action serves its interests.

“The rights holder has to make the ultimate decision.”

Eyal Arad, 2023

DAZN’s partnership with Videocites, announced in May 2023, shows the enforcement side of that work. DAZN said the technology could automatically remove 98 percent of detected unauthorized streams within minutes. The qualification matters: that was a statement about streams detected by the system, rather than a claim that almost all piracy everywhere had vanished.

For a live sports broadcaster, speed has a practical value. A match continues while someone searches for an illicit stream, checks it and asks for removal. Arad’s pitch addressed the scale of personal streaming and the limits of manual responses. His company’s move toward fan intelligence grew alongside that protection business. The problem of unauthorized live distribution did not disappear because fan clips had become commercially interesting.

An iceberg with a commercial department

Arad has an accessible way of explaining the audience problem: an iceberg. The official league account is the visible portion. Teams, players, media organizations and partners extend the picture. Farther down sits the activity of fans and independent creators. A dashboard confined to the top leaves a substantial part of the story underwater.

In the NBA’s case, that meant looking beyond the publishers everyone already knew. The league’s Kevin Esteves described how Swish Cultures emerged in the data, helping lead to a collaboration. That is a concrete consequence of measurement: a creator can become visible to an organization in a way that changes the relationship. A spreadsheet occasionally earns its keep.

Arad’s familiar shorthand for the underlying technology is “Shazam for video.” It makes recognition sound immediate and familiar. The commercial question comes afterward: which people are helping a sports property reach an audience, and how might the property work with them? The iceberg explains why a league would bother searching beyond the accounts it already manages.

The league takes a seat at the table

Turning recognition into a sports business also required relationships. In January 2020, Infront announced an investment in Videocites and a plan to introduce its services to rights partners. The applications included content protection, media monitoring and content management. It gave the company a route into organizations that already had valuable footage and commercial reasons to understand its circulation.

By March 2023, Videocites had closed a $10 million Series B led by Velocity Capital Management, with NBA Equity and Infront participating. The NBA was both a user of the technology and a financial backer. For Arad, the relationship brought the company’s work into the business of a league whose clips circulate far beyond its own publishing channels.

There is a temptation to tell a founder’s story as a sequence of solitary realizations. The names around Arad make that difficult. There were co-founders, investment partners and executives inside sports organizations, each with a different reason to care about video. The product had to answer their questions as well as perform its own technical task.

Arad’s public comments about company building offer a small personal window into that work. After appearing on Sebastian Schieke’s podcast in 2024, he described building a company as among the most challenging and rewarding experiences of his life. It is a more revealing detail than another product promise: by then, he had been leading this business for a decade.

The name catches up

By 2024, Arad was explaining recognition in terms of learning what a basketball game looks like, rather than simply locating an identical file. MediaTrack could identify derivative material, including video captured by people watching in person or at home. The business was addressing marketing and intelligence needs alongside the enforcement questions that had given it an early market.

He also described a reciprocal relationship between a league and a creator. Supporting the creator could help that person gain subscribers and commercial opportunities; the league could receive additional exposure. The appeal was practical. People were already making content about the sport. Measuring that activity could help a league decide whom to approach and what to support.

The January 2026 rebrand gave that wider business a name. Arad said the ripple effect had become a recurring subject in conversations with rights holders and brands. The announcement described MediaTrack Lens for deeper performance analysis and MediaTrack Landscape for comparison with competitors, including measures of views and media value.

His ambition was to help brands understand what their content was doing, what it was worth and who was engaging with it, at scale and speed. That is a broader assignment than finding a copy. It moves the conversation toward decisions about audiences, commercial partners and the next piece of content an organization might choose to make.

Still following the fans

Arad’s public conversations have followed that expansion. In March 2024, he joined StreamTime Sports to discuss the reach and value of fan-generated content. His June appearance on The High-Performance CEO Show covered digital tools and fan engagement. In 2025, he discussed sports rights and distribution on The Business of YouTube.

By September 23, 2026, he was discussing the subject with colleague Amos Varon on The Profluence Pod. The episode returned to the company’s origins, the shift toward fan-content intelligence and the value created outside official channels. More than twelve years after the founding, the people beyond the original publisher remained central to his account of the business.

The appealing tension in Arad’s story is that better recognition makes room for a more discriminating response. An organization can protect what it sells while learning about the people who spread its story. For the engineer who helped build the search engine, a match is now an invitation to ask another question. For the fan with the phone, the answer may determine whether the next message contains a complaint or an offer.