Everybody has that one awful home video of them playing a sport that they should have never played in the first place. Maybe they are seven-years-old, and decide to sit down in the middle of a soccer field. Or perhaps they are twelve, and are hit in the face with a basketball.
Thankfully, for those who can relate, a parent or someone in the crowd has usually shot the home videos shakily and poorly. However, the next generation of amateur athlete might not get that same treatment, if Israeli technology and services company Pixellot has their say.
“We see ourselves covering the uncovered world of amateur sports, college sports, corporate leagues and semi-pro sports, offering an affordable option to cover all of these events that haven’t been covered or covered in a quality manner,” said CEO of Pixellot, Alon Werber.
But Werber noted that Pixellot’s purpose strays far from attempting to embarrass an entire generation of unathletic children.
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They are providing coaches and athletes the opportunity to dissect games or practices in a never before seen manner. No longer do high school coaches have to sit a student up in the stands with a low-quality camcorder, but the Pixellot system can operate for each and every team. With 50 million uncovered amateur games annually worldwide, Pixellot caters for countless fan communities that are currently underserved.
Pixellot is allowing relatives or fans who can’t attend the game to see their favorite athletes, who compete below the professional level, in real-time. The system has been installed in amateur venues such as Basketball City in Manhattan and the Hupu sports halls in China where viewing numbers of up to 60,000 for previously uncovered games definitely prove the case for amateur sportscasting.
To explain further, Pixellot creates a device called the Lemur. It comes in a regular Lemur package and Lemur Advanced. The actual device is typically fix installed, and looks like a cylinder with four cameras that each record different areas of the action and produce a panoramic image. It is fully automated, and merely needs a person to set it up once, and then the Pixellot captures the game all on its own.
The Lemur’s numerous cameras catch all angles of the field, court or rink. Then, it uses special software to stitch together those different cameras into one panoramic view.
With this panoramic view, anybody watching can zoom in on a certain portion of the broadcast or replay in any space. But, the Lemur goes beyond just filming an event—it also does much of the production and post-production thanks to auto-tracking mechanisms. Based on Pixellot’s video analysis tools , the system can also automatically generate highlight clips of the hottest moments of the game.
“I think that’s what makes our system special … It (the Lemur) provides everything from capture to processing and production, loading everything up to the cloud, and from there distributing it to various applications, both web and mobile,” Werber said.
The Lemur also comes with mobile viewing, among other more sophisticated perks that focus on helping coaches, for example in the English Premier League that has equipped its clubs with Lemur systems. Fans who download the mobile app can easily create their own game clips and share them on social networks.
First, the Lemur can easily work with an announcer calling the game, and it also has live audio. But, perhaps the most sophisticated part of the Lemur is that it is capable of live streaming a matchup. It does this with little to no work on the part of the operator. For teams and media platforms looking to edit game footage, the Lemur Advanced offers a production suite for remote and post-game production.
The Lemur Advanced even offers automated player tracking on recordings, so the broadcasts pans along with the player, which allows the user to easily create individual player videos. The founders of Pixellot actually came from player tracking company SportVU, so this feature definitely relies on his strengths. SportVU works closely with the NBA to provide camera-based player tracking technology, gathering quite a bit of data on player positioning, speed and other metrics.
Finally, the Lemur is capable of 8K resolution and virtual reality, so its bases are covered for the next ten or so years of broadcasting. So far, Pixellot’s Lemur has surpassed even the utilities that the founders have intended. Werber mentioned a women’s soccer team in the Netherlands that used the system to cover one of their matches and distribute footage to fans’ mobile devices. In this match they saw their social media activity go up by 210 percent, as compared to when they did not have the Lemur installed.
There appears to be relatively no downsides for a high school, college or semi-pro team looking to add a little bit of broadcasting zeal to their program. It is important to note that acquiring the Lemur means that an organization will never have to pay for a broadcast or production crew.
Additionally, the Lemur solution includes options to include banners and virtual ads to the broadcast, which opens sponsorship opportunities for brands, and enables schools and venues to see ROI within the first year.
So, in the long term, the Lemur looks to be the cheapest, easiest option for a team looking for a broadcast alternative. And, the Lemur is surely leagues better than a dad’s shaky hand holding a camera.