Hoopers Club is a Portuguese startup dedicated to creating communities of basketball enthusiasts and professionals around the world through venues, events, products, and sports broadcasts.
The Hoopers Summer League, in its first edition in 2022, took place for 17 days in July with the aim of becoming a reference league in Portuguese basketball, filling a competitive void during the summer vacation.
The tournament featured 24 teams, 16 male and 8 female, with a total of 60 different games divided between two gyms. The games were scheduled outside traditional working hours to allow both amateur and professional athletes to participate.
Capturing and Producing the Tournament Games
Capturing, producing, and broadcasting games on streaming platforms is a complex and costly task. Even a simple live broadcast of a basketball game requires at least one camera, an operator, and an editor, and the costs of hiring such services can reach up to a thousand euros per game.
Furthermore, the matches were held in different gyms, with more than 20 kilometers between them, making it challenging to scale up broadcasts and consequently increasing operational costs.
These costs would have made it impractical to live stream all the games, and only the finals and semifinals would have been broadcast, resulting in a subpar experience for the Hoopers community members.
mantis.ai Enabled Hoopers to Broadcast All Games Live
mantis.ai offers a platform with proprietary software that utilizes artificial intelligence and computer vision to automate the capture and editing of sports videos. In the case of the Hoopers Summer League, the tool used was AutoCam, capable of turning a static camera video into a simulation of a video captured by an operator.
A GoPro camera was used, positioned on the side of the court with sufficient elevation to provide a complete view of all players without needing adjustments during the broadcast. The camera’s signal was sent directly to the platform via RMTP, processed to simulate a camera operator and exported to another platform that added team names, score, and game time as graphics before sending the broadcast directly to YouTube.
mantis.ai operated the platform in collaboration with Hoopers. Together, they defined all necessary deliverables, including the solution architecture, a test of platform integration, and the desired broadcast latency, enabling all 60 games of the tournament to be broadcast live seamlessly.
The games were played in the afternoons and evenings on weekdays and throughout the day on weekends. Therefore, more than one camera operator would be needed on weekends to cover all the day’s matches.
Results
The results can be divided into two categories, one related to the deliverables provided by the iSPORTiSTiCS team to Hoopers and the other related to the cost savings generated by using the platform for video production compared to traditional live broadcasts.
Regarding what was produced by mantis.ai, all 60 tournament games had live broadcasts pass directly through the platform, using autonomous camera technology to perform automatic broadcast editing. The broadcasts had 100% platform uptime, without any downtime or signal delays at any point.”
