After outfitting its technology for a professional soccer team in Germany, PlaySight is expanding its suite of autonomous scouting and coaching tools across the soccer industry.
At the Soccerex Global Convention last month, PlaySight co-founder and CEO Chen Shachar pitched the company’s newest cloud-based video technology, SmartField, to European football clubs as a way to “maximize performance” through real-time 4K video and analysis tools.
With its infrastructure permanently installed at training facilities or on fields, PlaySight offers automatic filming from multiple angle camera views. It also provides instant replay, which enables coaches to go over an athlete’s performance during practice or games (think during halftime or water breaks).
Shachar said a benefit of the PlaySight platform is that it enables coaches, scouts and athletes to analyze performance just after it happened when it’s still fresh in everyone’s mind.
“Video is the No. 1 technology to maximize your performance,” he said at Soccerex. “If the coach wants to show a player something he did wrong or right, researcher shows it has to be at the event. If you wait an hour, if you wait two hours, if you wait the day after the match or practice, it’s not relevant anymore. It has to be accessible.”
The company wants to turn its product into an all-in-one training and scouting platform. Coaches and scouts can livestream and record performance, leave in-app voice messages, drawings and notes to communicate their thoughts with players, and connect third-party tracking devices such as Catapult wearables to add a layer of data and context to video streams.
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While the platform is primarily designed to assist with mobile scouting and coaching, its data-infused video streams might also eventually be repackaged to enhance fan engagement and broadcasts, Shachar said.
PlaySight first experimented with this technology in soccer earlier this year when it partnered with TSG 1899 Hoffenheim — a Bundesliga club — and represented the company’s first foray into the world’s biggest sport.
PlaySight has for the past few years provided similar video-based analytics capabilities in professional tennis and basketball, having its SmartCourt used by the Golden State Warriors among other NBA teams. The company has also announced it is expanding to golf.