Distribution of sports content online is at an all time high. Streaming sports online opens up a wide range of digital technologies to enhance the viewer experience – machine learning, AR and VR to name a few. Startups likeVideoVerse are trying to make the most out of this demand to allow broadcasters to go beyond simply presenting facts and metrics and to exponentially increase viewer engagement throughout the tournament.
“Our machine learning driven sports platform analyses over 180 important events and objects in live streaming content across 27 sports. We have proprietary machine learning models built with a huge bank of data we have collected over time,” says Saket Dandotia, co-founder, VideoVerse. The platform provides a dashboard for the broadcasters to utilise the machine learning models and create dynamic custom objects, highlights and key moments as per their requirement, real time.
In addition to providing real time content enhancements, the startup also works with sports teams and coaches to provide predictive player analysis. “For instance, in football, we use certain important data points collected real time during matches to analyse a player’s technique and performance,” says Dandotia. “This allows the teams to know which player to replace in what position during the match, real time,” he adds.
The data points are also given to the teams and coaches post the matches with an in-depth analysis of the players. According to Dandotia, this allows the team management to customise training for each player in areas where they are lacking – fitness, technique or any other.
In addition to these capabilities, the startup is bringing in ChatGPT as a D2C experience. In the case of sports the direct consumer is the team owner. “For instance, if an IPL team owner wants to know which player to send next to bat while the match is going on, they can chat with our models using ChatGPT and get a predictive analysis based on real time match data and historic player data,” says Dandotia. According to him, this is a game changer as it reduces the decision time for the owners and aids the effectiveness of the decision.
On streaming platforms, the ChatGPT integration allows viewers to search and close in on a specific moment in a match or a tournament. Further, for coaches, ChatGPT reflects as a chat assistant that can be queried to get customised training insights for the players.
VideoVerse has raised series B funding of $47 million recently and is profitable with operations in India, the USA, England and Israel. With rapid growth, the startup is trying to solve challenges in improving computing and predicting accuracy of its algorithms. “The challenge is also an opportunity, as the sports business is a very dynamic one and there is no pre-defined algorithm model.
We want to take the lead and continuously train the model with the latest datasets to have the best accuracy,” says Dandotia.
