For the longest time, high school athletes that want to get discovered by top college programs had to submit standard VHS tapes or DVDs of their highlight reels. This process still continues to this day since it’s a basic format to use. The ability to dictate what’s shown has been made possible due to computer editing software, albeit at significant costs and time.
The internet and YouTube have played a huge role in expediting, facilitating, and promoting NCAA prospects to the forefront. A plethora of websites emerged, like Takkle, MaxPreps, and Rivals, to tap into this cottage industry. YouTube’s mainstream adoption and search engine-driven functionality compels users to produce videos themselves. The confluence of technological platforms’ accessibility and the various parties’ interests drive this big business.
For instance, during this 2014 recruiting cycle, the Oregon Ducks gave out just 111 offers to 1,000 prospective student-athletes, per 247Sports. That figure pales in comparison to 184 and 148 by the Alabama Crimson Tide and USC Trojans, respectively. There’s a lot of factors considered when schools make these decisions beyond simply resources. Every facet in an athlete’s profile has to be quantified and thoroughly evaluated–one way or another.
ESPN’s NFL Analyst, Chris Mortensen, became a consultant and investor to his son’s idea for a site, PlayNextLevel, designed to garner exposure for high school football players a few years ago. The now defunct website hoped to penetrate this marketplace and managed to register a mere 500 subscribers then.
“You have to be more proactive,” Mortensen told The Dallas Morning News at the time. “That’s the one thing when we talk players, they say: ‘If I could do it all over, I would have been more proactive myself.’”
It’s clearly a numbers game…
The Israeli startup Numbeez aimed to build an entire community around statistics. Yotam Aharonson, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, believes that numbers provide a great way to “tell a story over time” and inherently are visual by nature. This medium looked to bring together sports analytics enthusiasts through its infographics.
Since the app’s iOS debut earlier this year, Numbeez’s user base delineated itself into two segments: those that liked to share interesting stats within a niche network and an athletic youth demographic trying to show off their achievements. The short, self-generated video clips that showcased their respective numbers interconnected this community. It’s the latter group, though, that they decided to build a secondary property called Numveed targeted at them. This web-based platform marries user-generated still photos into a montage video that highlights stats. The aforementioned climate in high school sports spawned Aharonson’s ambition to do so. Numbeez showed signs to create an alternative vehicle to cater to their needs.
He acknowledged that there’s a ton of competition for the precious, few scholarships universities dole out to potential student-athletes; and to a lot of them, this could mean the difference of being able to afford an education. A key hurdle to differentiate themselves from others is the price to obtain a high-quality of their performance to present to recruiters.
“Most of them don’t have the tools to edit video video or even high-quality video footage of their games,” Aharonson tells SportTechie.
“There are services out there that start at $500 come film an athlete! But their coaches know their stats; even very small programs have great stat-tracking.”
Aharonson thinks that these kids’ friends and family members often have good enough smartphones to take great photos or video from. The electronics they already possess can be utilized to help build a portfolio-worth of content, which can readily be uploaded to well-known platforms while funneling it through Numveed.
Thus, the value proposition is: “a beautiful and unusual way to convey a stats-based message, which is not relying on high-quality videos (just a few nice photos) and the production process is ultra-quick and in budget.”
A Numveed account starts off with a package of credits for a video or two, typically taking ten of them for less than a dollar and $0.99 per minute of video after that can be purchased. Once a user has registered, they can name their clip, add a cover photo, and choose a background soundtrack. The next steps consist of adding stats, short description, and photo pertinent to each number. And that would complete the process.
At the core of this technology, however, pertains to it’s rather similar characteristic to Facebook’s Look Back video concept that released recently. According to CNET, close to 200 million people watched their respective video and 50 percent of whom subsequently shared it. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, called this product’s results as “amazing” and “showed the power of the Facebook brand” thereafter.
This case study proved the relevancy for short-form montage-esque clips. A massive amount of users simply “loved it” insofar as making it viral immediately. There wasn’t any learning curve necessary and unified people over shared values. Any product that touches home the way Facebook’s Look Back did initially has a chance to grow independently in its own right, provided it’s crafted well and to the right context.
“The simplicity of the process is a key factor; and the fact that the user was not required to even think on how to create his ‘look back’ is probably what made it successful,” explains Aharonson.
“It may have been a little bit too automated, though. I’ve heard horror stories of forgotten ex-boy and girlfriends in the videos, etc.”
In Numveed, on the other hand, the process happens to be a bit more complex since the user, again, has to pull in the data prior to creating the clip. This interval of time can make a difference on its scalability potential. Regardless of how savvy the end user is, the UI and UX configuration must translate extremely well in order to convert high levels of engagement.
That said, SportTechie has just learned that Numbeez had to shut down its entire operations because they ran out funding from Navitrio, a digital investment firm whose other assets include cloud-based companies of Cloudyn and Pose, before they reached a surplus of users.
“Since our audience have a higher motivation and a clear goal when creating their Numveeds, I believe they will go the extra mile and generate cool Numveeds,” Anahorson continued in relation to Facebook’s Look Back idea.
The price and perils that come with a high school athlete trying to get noticed and that of startups vying to get traction appear to not be mutually exclusive.