Founded in 2012, Keemotion, a Belgium-based sports production startup, incubated from a university within the country called UCL. During an image analysis project sponsored by the European Union, a researcher, who was personally passionate about the game of basketball, decided to create a system that could film the sport without cameramen.
“In a world headed towards driverless cars, why wouldn’t we have ‘humanless cameras’?”
While the former deals with safety questions before it comes to fruition, the latter presents a marked shift in filming production. Fully automated video production has arrived, it just needed the right combination of hardware and software to align.
In effect, automation is a virtually inevitable part of the future. As the aforementioned statement made by Milton Lee, Keemotion’s Chief Executive Officer, to SportTechie suggests, it includes basketball as well.
Founded in 2012, Keemotion, a Belgium-based sports technology startup, was incubated at a university called UCL. The idea was hatched during an image analysis project sponsored by the European Union. A researcher, who was passionate about the game of basketball, decided to create a system that could film the sport without cameramen. Through leveraging Amazon’s Cloud, Keemotion intends to change how this game is produced.
Keemotion consists of three technologies in one. First, it automates the video and production of a live sporting event, thereby enabling the client to live stream to the internet. Secondly, with the same video feed and simple tagging features, Keemotion allows coaching staffs to review and edit practices and games in real-time. And third, through Keemotion’s simple tagging capability, highlights can be shared instantaneously to social media applications, like Facebook and Twitter.
Keemotion, thus, is both a hardware and software product. The hardware is comprised of two cameras that film each side of the basketball court; a third camera captures the scoreboard and shot clock data collection and a local server beams the content to Amazon’s Cloud. Keemotion’s software overlays the image produced by the two cameras and zooms in on the action, like a virtual cameraman. Their proprietary software is a “motion-following technology,” which identifies and tracks player movements. The end-product allows coaches to digest, analyze, and share practice or game footage in real-time; fans can watch games and share clips through social media. Games can be consumed multiple ways: livestreamed to any number of devices, on-demand, pay-per-view, and some clients are even using it to broadcast on TV.
In late 2014, Keemotion was purchased by an investor group led by David Abrams. Abrams, a Senior Managing Director at Cerberus U.K., was the Founder of Apollo’s European Principal Finance Fund and is Co-Managing Owner of the New York Yankees’ AAA-Affiliate, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders. EMC, a merchant bank formed in partnership with Creative Artists Agency back in 2008, is also part of the group. Keemotion’s value proposition is that it is completely automated and cost-efficient, thereby increasing productivity and savings at the same time.
The cost savings can be significant, considering that high-end sports broadcast productions can near six figures. While Keemotion is not a high-end broadcast equivalent, it is a viable solution for middle-tier digital productions and below. With Keemotion’s technology, you eliminate the need for camera crews, production trucks, cabling, staff travel, and much more. In the past, there have been practices and games that were never filmed before due to budget and manpower constraints; now teams in all demographics can livestream their games and film their practices. Head coaches increase their efficiency, assigning their staff to other duties, instead of having someone behind the camera; video coordinators can be focused on the tagging of practice through the device rather than filming.
Moreover, coaches can film whenever and for however long they’d like. Additional productivity and cost savings occur as organizations and universities with multiple teams use the same court (i.e. men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball). Now all the practices and games can be filmed, livestreamed, and catalogued through one system. Since Keemotion is an open or closed network livestreaming solution, coaches can watch practice remotely while on the road recruiting; edits can be shared with players during practice or sent to their smartphones while they’re hitting the showers. The production quality is 720p HD; therefore, every production looks the same. The tagging and social media features are simple to use and done manually.
Lee expounds on why there’s a need for Keemotion in the current hoops marketplace: “Between men’s and women’s college and professional basketball leagues, there are thousands of teams around the world. All of these teams would like to livestream their games with real-time social media capability; and film and analyze their practices. There is a huge variance in how these teams address this need. Even at the NBA level, some teams use very sophisticated video solutions for practices and some use off the shelf cameras. Keemotion aims to standardize this for as many of those thousands of teams as possible.”
Considering that NBA teams are offered the best technologies in the world, this can be overwhelming, at times, in determining the real payoff from these technologies–limiting the pool of startups that can be a part of this ecosystem without first providing a trial run there or elsewhere.
Can the technology really do what they say it does?
Is the technology a difference maker in our day-to-day performance?
Will the technology be implemented and used, or will it sit on the shelf?
These are some of the questions asked by pro teams before deciding to be an early adopter, even for something as ubiquitous as video.
“Oftentimes, teams that are the most cutting-edge in adopting these technologies make it part of their identity, like the Golden State Warriors. They pride themselves on being ahead of the curve in instituting basketball technology and business technology. But for teams where this is not a priority, they are typically the last ones to adopt new technologies,” says Lee, who previously served as the Director of Basketball Operations with the Brooklyn Nets.
When Keemotion first began, however, sales of their cameras were being made directly to professional teams and high schools throughout Europe. As more teams got wind of the quality of the product, leagues started to adopt the technology. The French LNB took the bold step of being Keemotion’s first league-wide partner. Today, the whole French, Finnish, and Austrian professional leagues have adopted Keemotion’s technology. As the product has matured and proven itself to these parties, they find themselves speaking to the entire gamut of players involved in the sports video delivery chain. In the United States, Keemotion is in advanced talks with a number of NBA and high major D1 basketball teams, as well as content providers, pro leagues, college conferences, and strategic partners.
Existing clients include the Philadelphia 76ers and 16-time champions of the Dutch Basketball League, Den Bosch. An example of the power of Keemotion, Den Bosch never livestreamed any of their games. Fans could not watch the games on TV or the internet. Today with Keemotion, Den Bosch livestreams every game, reaching fans all over the Netherlands and around the world. Another example is the Korisliga in Finland. The Korisliga uses Keemotion to stream games on a livestream closed-network, where viewers subscribe similar to the NBA’s League Pass service; they have also begun broadcasting their Keemotion games on live TV.
In the last few years, startups in the scouting and recruiting space have emerged, like Krossover and Huddl. They both function as a video analysis solution, with the former doing the tagging for you whereas the latter lets the user do the tagging themselves. Considering the two have raised over $100 million in total equity funding, this market segment has plenty of potential. Pixellot and Hawk-Eye have brought to market competing livestream solutions, but both are unproven and neither offer the breadth of options that Keemotion offers.
“We video and produce the content that they (Krossover and Hudl) analyze; so, hypothetically, we could be partners with both. Both are software solutions. We are hardware and software. I believe Pixellot and Hawk-Eye are both hardware and software as well; but to be frank, I haven’t heard much about them” says Lee; Keemotion, too, has ensured its technology is patented in the United States and around the globe.
The fact that coaches are already accustomed to watching a lot of video, Keemotion’s technology fits seamlessly into their regular routines. It’s nothing new to how they work or intrusive; rather, it simplifies the process of consuming and sharing video in an intuitive way.
Simply put by Lee, or coaches for that matter: “Film doesn’t lie.”
