I've seen some interesting points in this thread about target users of the product and the big issue seems to be:
- Target user group is unlikely to spend this much on the type of equipment and/or isn't technically inclined enough to leverage it.
At first glance I'd say this is fair, based on traditional markets and camera use but I'd argue 2 things:
1. The demand of this type of product is likely to rise. As self broadcasting goes up, the demand of this type of ingenuity will rise. What Twitch is doing for gaming, this could help bring along for many other areas of interest.
2. Through internal development or by going open source, the development of tracking could be increased to support a number of different objects. Pucks/Balls in sports in particular could be very interesting to automate the recording of sporting events.
With these 2 points noted, I can imagine the use of these in a number of scenarios- for consistency of an argument, I'll take the use case of hockey.
If I'm a minor league hockey team, if I can obtain the proper quality of cameras at a reasonable enough price to surround my rink, along with the proper tracking system applied to each player and devices of the game (pucks, nets), and if I can coordinate this with software to turn on which devices I follow per camera at any point, I could create a system for broadcasting a top quality version of my game online without the cost of camera men as well as the space that may be required for the setup.
Additionally, if I'm the team, I could use this in practice to follow each of my players setting a camera to each so that I can review their particular actions and do video review with each - without having to limit what gets taped for each guy or having multiple camera guys at each practice.
Add this to object recognition software and I could start using the cameras to collect more about where people are on the ice during games and plays and push along my ability to analyze what is happening and how I can work on tactics/strategy to manage it.
Again, a lot of this is relying on additional software/tracking/processes but I believe as a technology, it's empowering. I'm not sure the current use case/expected market is ready for this (or at least not in the form it's likely to have technically) but I believe in a few iterations, we'll see something that serves a significant market share, especially if the product roadmap includes abilities and integrations to further its use with other software and mutiple unit tracking capabilities.
...and if you're the facility, you're renting the film to the team.
Also, from experience an increasing amount of the coaching of youth soccer is outsourced to coaching companies (like QuickStrike or PlayersEye), and some of them are starting to include video analysis in their packages.
And then there is, for what it's worth, recruiting films. There's a lot of people trying to video their kids and putting together a college recruitment highlight reel.
People doing that would be happy to drop what is, in reality, not very much money to help put together something they hope will save them $10Ks in tuition
- Target user group is unlikely to spend this much on the type of equipment and/or isn't technically inclined enough to leverage it.
At first glance I'd say this is fair, based on traditional markets and camera use but I'd argue 2 things:
1. The demand of this type of product is likely to rise. As self broadcasting goes up, the demand of this type of ingenuity will rise. What Twitch is doing for gaming, this could help bring along for many other areas of interest.
2. Through internal development or by going open source, the development of tracking could be increased to support a number of different objects. Pucks/Balls in sports in particular could be very interesting to automate the recording of sporting events.
With these 2 points noted, I can imagine the use of these in a number of scenarios- for consistency of an argument, I'll take the use case of hockey.
If I'm a minor league hockey team, if I can obtain the proper quality of cameras at a reasonable enough price to surround my rink, along with the proper tracking system applied to each player and devices of the game (pucks, nets), and if I can coordinate this with software to turn on which devices I follow per camera at any point, I could create a system for broadcasting a top quality version of my game online without the cost of camera men as well as the space that may be required for the setup.
Additionally, if I'm the team, I could use this in practice to follow each of my players setting a camera to each so that I can review their particular actions and do video review with each - without having to limit what gets taped for each guy or having multiple camera guys at each practice.
Add this to object recognition software and I could start using the cameras to collect more about where people are on the ice during games and plays and push along my ability to analyze what is happening and how I can work on tactics/strategy to manage it.
Again, a lot of this is relying on additional software/tracking/processes but I believe as a technology, it's empowering. I'm not sure the current use case/expected market is ready for this (or at least not in the form it's likely to have technically) but I believe in a few iterations, we'll see something that serves a significant market share, especially if the product roadmap includes abilities and integrations to further its use with other software and mutiple unit tracking capabilities.