Before launching his fitness streaming service Ky-Fit Live, Iñaki García was a well-known personal trainer with a roster of celebrity clients in Spain. Then the pandemic hit. Iñaky’s work dried up as Spain locked down, and the high-end fitness center where he ran classes closed. The future looked uncertain.
Now, thanks to Vimeo OTT, thousands of people – the self-styled “Iñakers” – in more than 50 countries tune in to his live afternoon workouts, streaming straight from his home studio.
Starting something special
Two days after the start of the first lockdown, Iñaky began his online classes, offering two or three workouts a day on Instagram. His high energy, optimistic style did more than help people stay fit – it created a sense of community who united around the daily workout ritual.
After providing 300 free classes to an ever-growing audience, Iñaky realised that he’d tapped into something special. So he converted his attic into a studio to livestream his sessions around the world. “Because of the positive impact we saw it was having, we wanted to continue the classes in a more professional way,” he explains. Ky-Fit Live was born.
A streaming platform fit for anything
“We were familiar with Vimeo, so we started with Vimeo On Demand and the response was incredible! On the first day of streaming, we sold out of all the subscriptions in three hours, and in just two months we had almost doubled our subscribers,” Iñaky says.
That growth has continued, with Iñaky able to monetize his content and scale his offering. Ky-Fit Live now has five live sessions a week, and subscribers can tailor their workouts to specific goals – like weight loss or building muscle mass – and the right intensity level. The channel also helps with nutrition, providing monthly menus to help people eat more healthily.
When Vimeo told him that his account was in the global top 1% of bandwidth thanks to its popularity, the move to Vimeo’s OTT platform made perfect sense.
“Being able to count on a solution like Vimeo OTT has allowed us to focus on what’s important and rest easy knowing that we are providing our users with the best technology, which adapts to multiple devices and multiple platforms,” says Iñaky.
Programming for the people
The key to the channel’s success, Iñaky believes, is that they’re always adding to and evolving their offer. “Our platform is alive and constantly transforming,” he says. “90% of our platform is live content and Ky-Fit Live currently has more than 500 videos available.”
But it’s not just Iñaky’s commitment to content that’s created such a safe space for his online sessions. “We’ve worked really hard to create an accessible platform for the world,” he adds. “For example, we have a group of blind subscribers that have trained with me since the beginning. It was essential that they feel comfortable in a digital environment and Vimeo provided us with many services in that regard.”
This confidence in the technology has allowed him to dream big for his channel, and the community it engages. In the future, Iñaky plans to organize in-person events and stream them over Vimeo OTT. He also wants to branch out into interviews with health and fitness experts.
Living better with technology
“We relied on Vimeo during a very delicate moment, when we understood that the only way to communicate with the world was through a screen,” notes Iñaky. But even as the world returns to in-person and hybrid events, he knows that the online community he’s built since the very first lockdown is KyFit’s special sauce.
“I haven’t invented anything,” repeated Iñaky. “Physical activity has always been around, but I’m concerned with doing things right.“The lockdown was the catalyst for change and Vimeo OTT was the tool that made it a reality.”
