With the largest database of global football video and data now connected to Hudl’s end-to-end analysis platform, it’s easier than ever to find talent, share content and collaborate.
Following yesterday's announcement that Wyscout will be joining the Hudl family, I wanted to provide some insight into the acquisition, the benefits it will provide the industry and look ahead to an exciting future.
Nimble & Adaptive Workflows
The goal of any analyst is to ask tough questions of their video and data and get actionable insights. Analysts spend too much time navigating complex workflows before they can even start asking those questions.
Clubs are held back from reaching their potential because they have to juggle a stack of different systems that don’t talk to each other.
By bringing our two companies together, we’re putting data and video at a club’s fingertips and giving them the tools to add their own personal perspective to that content.
Building on the success of our Sportscode product, we’re creating the most comprehensive platform in global football, but that platform can’t feel intimidating to our clubs. So, we’re also making that platform nimble and adaptive to deliver the insights you need when and where you need them.
Helping You Reach Your Potential, Then & Now
We’ve come a long way since David (Graff - CEO), Brian (Kaiser - CTO) and I met at college and developed our first prototype for the Nebraska Cornhuskers football team. But what we set out to do in 2006 still holds true today. We want to help teams reach their full potential through video analysis, data and communication. We want to help coaches and their staff save time so they can invest even more time in their athletes and their families.
Both Wyscout and Hudl were born out of relatively small towns in Italy and the U.S.,respectively, and from the earliest days of meeting Matteo (Campodonico, CEO) and the teams at Wyscout, we felt a strong connection. This connection stems from the fact both companies entrench themselves in the small communities we call home.
We both care deeply about our people and our companies making an impact on the community around us. We both have a similar mission to impact sports globally. And both companies have a deep belief in the power of technology and how it can help coaches, athletes, and teams in a major way.
People Power
From the beginning, it’s been critically important to us that our people really understand our customers. That’s meant the team we hire are people that have worked in the industry, including former analysts and coaches; they really understand our customers’ pain and they can see when our products are solving that pain. Wyscout places the same emphasis on their people. They make sure their team deeply understands their customers and includes talent from the same industry they strive to serve.
From these relatively humble beginnings, Hudl and Sportscode are now used globally in 35 different sports, across 6 million users and 150,000 teams. Wyscout has over 550,000 player profiles from 200 leagues and championships with over 2000 professional clubs, federations and player agencies using the platform. This scale provides exciting opportunities for innovation and collaboration.
The Pro Suite and Ongoing Innovation
This announcement isn’t about the acquisition or the two companies involved. It’s really about solving the toughest problems our clubs and teams face every day and to do that it was clear to us that we needed to bring two platforms together into one.
The Pro Suite is our end-to-end solution for the world's top sports organisations. It covers everything from automated capture, data services, video analysis and distribution. When we look at the way the world's top organisations use the Pro Suite, we find them doing things like deep analysis in Sportscode across multiple matches - in some cases 10, 20, 30 matches. By bringing Wyscout into the Hudl platform, it’ll become effortless for any sports organisation to pull those 10 or 20 matches into Sportscode in a matter of seconds to conduct deep, personalised analysis.
This move also means the investments Hudl and Wyscout have made in machine learning and artificial intelligence can come together and bring value to our customers even faster.
We know the most effective workflows in sports start and end with video. By bringing Wyscout into the Pro Suite, we’re now putting hundreds of thousands of matches and clips at the fingertips of every Pro Suite user so that it’s even easier to start and end with the right video.
You're going to feel value from the two companies joining forces in the coming weeks and months, but what we’re really excited about is what’s next. What’s next for us is making sure that every club is making powerful, data-driven decisions every day and they don’t need an army of data scientists to make that happen.
Our vision is big because that’s what you deserve, and I’ve never been more confident that we’ll deliver on it. Wyscout joining the Hudl family takes us a step closer to bringing this end-to-end environment to you all.
To learn more about the marriage of Hudl and Wyscout, visit our dedicated website.
John Wirtz, Hudl Chief Product Officer
