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When Dave Glover, a sports technoogy consultant and former vice president at Avid Sports was recently named CEO of Game Plan Technologies, provider of a video editing and analysis system for athletic teams, it signaled a shift in momentum in the marketplace. Keeping its costs low through a software-only solution, Game Plan caters to large sports like football and basketball at the high school and Division II and III college level, as well as volleyball, soccer, softball, and a range of other sports in those markets. Glover sat down with SVG and shared his vision for the company and trends he sees developing in the industry. Q: What is the mission of Game Plan? A: Game Plan is a two-year-old company that started up originally with a purpose of serving the sports technology industry with more cost-effective solutions for the traditional use of video. Game Plan came about and said it doesn’t have to be so expensive, there has to be a simpler way. That was the foundation of the company. It started with high school sports with the intention of making that the primary market for the company, and shortly thereafter a bunch of big college programs and Division II and III schools found the Game Plan solutions. Q: How does the software work? A: It’s a system that captures video from live or from tape or DVD, adds statistical information about the event, and then allows coaches and athletes to take that statistical data and to break down the video into logical sequences for training, team preparation, and analysis. They can then take those video sequences and distribute them over the web. As a game is happening live, there is a computer in the press box with standard off-the-shelf wireless Ethernet. The game is captured, cut up into plays, and every play is transmitted over wireless Internet, so every team who is supposed to receive that digital video is receiving it live as soon as it is available from the PC. Plays are uploaded to network, downloaded to their drive, and converted back to DV-AVI within 60 seconds of the play happening, and it’s automated so that the coaches don’t even know it’s happening. It’s the perfect coaching solution: push a button and go home. Q: What technology are you relying on? A: It is all tapeless, and supports multiple digital video formats. Most companies have approached the use of digital video for sports with very complicated, very high-bandwidth video formats, and because of that, they require expensive hardware and storage systems. Game Plan has created digital video systems that can use any video format. If you need small streaming video you can do that. If you need HD you can do that. Game Plan can use whatever digital video format the customer requires for their solution, even to iPods. As the game is being captured live, I can distribute video directly to your iPod at your house. Q: What are some of the best features of Game Plan? A: Game Plan’s solutions are what we call video agnostic; it doesn’t know what form of video is required. The video and the data and the software can all function with whatever data is required. In my career I’ve never had that capability before, and it’s pretty exciting. There are a number of companies that sell digital video solutions, but how many of them give a volleyball coach specific game notes, reports, and analysis for volleyball? As coaches are out there looking for solutions they want to work with someone that understands what they do. We can deliver solutions with specific statistics and reports for the sport all on one platform. That’s the philosophy and that’s the change: we’re building solutions so that the university can buy one platform, coaches can access it from their editing devices, and deliver it to all 600 athletes at one school. Athletes can log in from anywhere they are and see practice footage, their schedule, the playbook. It’s no longer secret and scary and mysterious. We watch television at home, so why can’t athletes get everything at home? The number one thing coaches hate is waiting, so we’re delivering solutions that deliver now. Q: How do you keep costs down? A: We sell 95% in software, which is far more cost-effective than large hardware solutions. A video editor with all of the features and functionality that the Game Plan editor has is traditionally $8,000-$20,000; Game Plan’s is about $4,000. Q: Do high school coaches understand the technologies? A: Coaches struggle with complicated software, and the right software is designed so that coaches should not have to have an engineering degree to use it. They should be able to push a button and make the video and stats arrive where they belong. The athletes have absolutely no problem using the software and love it. Student athletes can log in from anywhere, from a Mac or a PC, any time, any place, and watch the video the coaches have created for them. Q: Where is Game Plan looking to expand? A: We believe that the multi-sport solutions are currently the most untapped market. Only a couple of companies do much of anything with the multi-sport marketplace, and, unlike five years ago where the football teams bought 95% of what was spent on sports technology, it’s a new day. It’s just as important to the volleyball team to have solutions to study, train, and analyze video, but they don’t have $150,000 to spend. It’s time to give everybody solutions they can afford. There are a lot more of these programs than there are division I BCS football programs. Q: What trends do you see in the digital video analysis market, and where do you see the industry heading? A: Every six years in the technology market, there’s a retooling; things change, whether film to tape, tape to digital, digital format A to digital format B – things all change, and we’re on the verge of another retooling. MPG4 compression formats now make really high quality video in much smaller sizes. Storage is getting ridiculously cheap. We’ve gone from available bandwidth taking 3 days to transfer a media file over the net to taking 20 minutes. The retooling has been about compression, bandwidth, and storage. For many years, people have complained that after they create video in a given system, they can’t use that video unless they’re in that system. The industry is really pushing back against this notion of proprietary video formats. Game plan is going to offer traditional open standard video formats, such that you can use the video in Game Plan after you’ve cut up the video and analyzed it, and anybody can open up that video in whatever system they have, so that it is truly format agnostic. I think that’s a very important trend that you’re going to see people expand on. Interoperability has become a very big push, and all of Game Plan’s solutions are open-format. © Copyright 2006-2007 sportsvideogroup |
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