Uscoutfor just might be leading the pack when it comes to business development among HighTechXL-teams. About two years ago, the groundwork was laid down for what is now Uscoutfor. Then, about half a million was raised in investments. Now, they are looking to establish further growth, and aim for an investment pushing towards three million.
Uscoutfor began as a community which would use User Generated Content to create scouting reports for professional and amateur football clubs. That has changed now.
“We had a choice to make. Should we use the money we raised in marketing? Doing so would make our name more known among a broader audience. Or are we going to create something which will help expand the possibilities the platform has to offer?”, Kevin Vink, one of the companies founders says. De
A decision fell on the latter. And the thing that was created to help the platform grow, soon became more dominant and turned out to be the core of Uscoutfor today.
The current Uscoutfor, which has grown from a team of two to a group of eight, can acknowledge and register sports highlights as they happen on the field. They have also developed a way to film matches and broadcast them, without the use of a traditional broadcast infrastructure, and without the use of humans.
“Our cameras can follow the game themselves, and behind the scenes, algorithms automatically look for highlights like goals, in real-time”, Vink says. A user of Uscoutfors app can select a favourite team to follow and will receive a pushed message which will show the goal a player of that team has just scored.
The cameras operate on their own, which makes for an interesting opportunity.“We can now all of a sudden live stream a game from the local amateur youth team”, Vink says. “This way we can broadcast pretty much everyone in an affordable and quick way, this no longer exclusively exists for the pro’s.”
Since the start of Uscoutfor at HighTechXL, a pilot version of the camera’s and the app has been set up. The cameras will be used with teams from various divisions. There will be camera’s with a Feyenoord youth team, a second division team and a third class team. “This way we want to show that we are not just there for the absolute top in sport, but also, or especially for the amateurs and youth players.”
This clip was shot with an automatized camera:
Right now, most media companies will aim for the top matches and competitions. “There is a big market for this that makes up for the high broadcasting costs. But there is also a market of about 1.2 million Dutch players that are on the pitch each week. That is the market we want to touch.”
Uscoutfor is not just meant for football. “That is where we started out, but we are now looking to develop similar technology that will get us to broadcast hockey in the same way. Volleyball and horseriding are two other sports that are on our radar.”
The ambition of the team does not stop at the borders of the country either. Vink: “Definitely not, we are speaking with English teams, Belgian parties and we have shipped a set of cameras to Canada. We can and really want to work on an international scale.”
These images have been shot automatically by cameras set up by Uscoutfor.
