How the NBA’s SportVU ball and player tracking tech changes the face of sports

Tonight sees the return of the NBA, but along with LeBron’s continued dominance and Derrick Rose’s return, comes a new breed of technology and influence. Each team in the NBA now has access to the SportVU, a camera system so technologically advanced that it has opened the door for Big Data to invade and shape the NBA, and subsequently, the sports world.
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Yahoo To Acquire Sports-Centric Mobile Developer Hitpost

Yahoo is set to acquire Hitpost, the maker of a handful of sports-centric mobile apps, to beef up its own sports offerings on iOS and Android, say sources familiar with the deal. The company’s team of seven or so is heading over to join Yahoo.
The company was co-founded by Aaron Krane who learned the science behind making social games at Slide. He wanted to marry that knowledge with products that appealed to sports fans. The idea was that there was an unexploited sweet spot in between freemium games like Zynga Poker and sports media. (We hear that Krane, who shifted into an executive chairman role from the CEO position, isn’t joining Yahoo. But Courtland Alves, who took over, is.)
Indeed, betting on sports is probably as old as sports are to human civilization. But an analogue to this behavior hadn’t really existed on mobile platforms.

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How the NBA’s SportVU ball and player tracking tech changes the face of sports

Tonight sees the return of the NBA, but along with LeBron’s continued dominance and Derrick Rose’s return, comes a new breed of technology and influence. Each team in the NBA now has access to the SportVU, a camera system so technologically advanced that it has opened the door for Big Data to invade and shape the NBA, and subsequently, the sports world.

From hardcore Fantasy sports players to casual fans of individual sports, almost everyone is aware of how stats-intensive sports are in modern times. If it’s a thing that happens, you can give it a fancy acronym and start tabulating how many times that thing took place. Baseball is the stats-heavy sport, but the NBA has been on the forefront of the digital revolution for quite awhile now — allowing clips to remain on YouTube, introducing the mobile League Pass, making a hard push into the podcasting and blogging space with the acquisition of the former Basketball Jones team, and working with TNT on a live multi-camera user-chosen view with TNT Overtime. So, it’s only right that LeBron’s league ushers in the age of data and technology.

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