SportVU is a camera system that collects data 25 times per second. Its aim is to follow the ball and all players on court. SportVU provides statistics such as real-time player and ball positioning through software and statistical algorithms. Through this data, STATS presents

performance metrics A performance indicator or key performance indicator (KPI) is a type of performance measurement. KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity (such as projects, programs, products and other initiatives) in which it en ...

for players and teams to use. STATS was first created for soccer, however it later expanded the core SportVU technology into basketball beginning with the 2010-2011 NBA season. Currently, STATS is the Official Tracking partner of the NBA. The NBA uses statistics collected by SportVU on

NBA.com The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional basketball league in North America. The league is composed of 30 teams (29 in the United States and 1 in Canada) and is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United St ...

and

NBATV NBA TV is an American sports-oriented pay television network owned by the National Basketball Association (NBA) and operated by Warner Bros. Discovery through its sports unit. Dedicated to basketball, the network features exhibition, regular ...

as well as in arenas across the country to provide information for the audience. SportVU statistics are utilized by teams in the league for the purpose of analytics and player development. The cameras keep a digitized visual record of every game, collecting players' positions and speed.

History

2005-2010

SportVU was created in 2005 by scientists, Gal Oz and Miky Tamir, who had a background in

missile tracking Measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) is a technical branch of intelligence gathering, which serves to detect, track, identify or describe the distinctive characteristics (signatures) of fixed or dynamic target sources. This often incl ...

and advanced optical recognition. They had previously used the same science to track soccer matches in Israel. SportVU was featured at national trade shows NAB 2007, in Las Vegas, and

International Broadcasting Convention International Broadcasting Convention, more commonly known by its initials IBC, is an annual trade show, held in September at the RAI Exhibition and Convention Centre in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. IBC's tagline is “By the industry. For the ...

2007, in Amsterdam. In 2008, SportVU was acquired by

STATS LLC Stats Perform (formerly STATS, LLC and STATS, Inc.) is a sports data and analytics company formed through the combination of Stats and Perform. The company is involved in sports data collection and predictive analysis for use across various s ...

. STATS then centers SportVU efforts on basketball. During the 2009 NBA Finals in Orlando, STATS demoed their SportVU technology for NBA executives. At the start of the 2010-2011 NBA season, four teams were contracted to use SportVU, the Dallas Mavericks, Houston Rockets, Oklahoma City Thunder and San Antonio Spurs.

2011-2015

SportVU converted their tracking system from delayed processing to real-time data delivery during the 2011-2012 NBA season. At the start of the 2012-2013 season, 10 teams were using SportVU. Since the 2013-2014 NBA season, the SportVU camera system was installed in all NBA arenas. In the same year, STATS added the ICE analytics platform to organize, display and analyze SportVU data. NBA team, Toronto Raptors, shared with sports blog,

Grantland ''Grantland'' was a sports and pop-culture blog owned and operated by ESPN. The blog was started in 2011 by veteran writer and sports journalist Bill Simmons, who remained as editor-in-chief until May 2015. ''Grantland'' was named after famed ...

, their progress with the use of SportVU's new algorithms. The Raptors Analytics Team created a graphical user interface to play video footage of the play from the X-Y coordinates.

2016-2017

In 2016, STATS and the NBA met an agreement to extend SportVU tracking data to more media outlets including

ESPN ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). The ...

NBA on TNT ''NBA on TNT'' is a branding used for broadcasts of the National Basketball Association (NBA) games, produced by Warner Bros. Discovery Sports, the sports division of the Warner Bros. Discovery Sports subsidiary of Warner Bros. Discovery and tel ...

, and

Bleacher Report Bleacher Report (often abbreviated as B/R) is a website that focuses on sport and sports culture. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, with offices in New York City and London. Bleacher Report was acquired by Turner Broadcasting System in Aug ...

. Beginning in the 2016-2017 season, STATS was used as France's

Ligue de Football Professionnel The Ligue de Football Professionnel (, ''Professional Football League''), commonly known as the LFP, is a French governing body that runs the major professional football leagues in France. It was founded in 1944 and serves under the authority o ...

's official data and tracking provider. STATS used SportVU to provide football data and statistics. After NBA's adoption of SportVU tracking technology in 2013, statisticians and data scientists used tools such as

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

to provide more complex statistics from the tracking data. At the 10th annual

MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference The MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (SSAC) is an annual event that provides a forum for industry professionals (executives and leading researchers) and students to discuss the increasing role of analytics in the sports industry. The conferen ...

in 2016, STATS's own Director of Data Science and his team was awarded for their contributions to a research paper on the prediction of shot outcomes in tennis. Other research papers completed for the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference included

Kirk Goldsberry Kirk Goldsberry (born 1977) is a basketball writer. He was the vice president for strategic research for the San Antonio Spurs, the lead analyst for Team USA Basketball, and a visiting researcher at the Harvard Institute of Quantitative Social Scie ...

's paper in 2014 concerning the prediction of points and evaluation of decision-making in basketball.

References

External links

*{{official website, http://www.stats.com/ Sports business Sports technology