Industry: Sports / Category: IoT

Motion-tracking equipment, such as camera and slow-motion video technology, has become established as the standard for measuring the accuracy and performance of pro athletes. A recent report from WinterGreen Research estimated that the fitness, sports and performance-wearables market will increase from $3.5 billion in 2014 to $14.9 billion by 2021. It has been generally forecast that wearable tech will boom over the next five years, but this report gives a more specific insight into how important fitness and sports devices will be. Analyst estimations predict a $25 billion valuation of the wearable tech industry as a whole by the year 2020, however most of that will come from smartwatches– which are not sport-specific products. Nonetheless, the monumental leaps in funding and innovation in wearable tech will certainly raise the profile and technical feasibility of performance wearables, inevitably opening the floodgates to an eventual higher market valuation within the niche.

It is important to note that sporting attitude and performance have become models for predictions and decision-making processes in the wider world of business. For example, the organization of teams in businesses is often inspired by a sport-based strategy and attitude. There are plentiful innovation points derived directly from sports and applied to corporate attitude, especially when organizing and managing teams, executing strategy and measuring output.

Wearable technology is designed to help sports coaches measure fatigue and performance in their teams during training sessions and competitive matches alike. When a game is on-going, coaches have access to an abundance of real-time data which helps them make decisions that were previously dictated by guess-work and instinct­–­ like whether a player should be substituted, and when. Due to the ability to track the success rate of certain decisions made in play, wearable technology can also highlight tactical strengths and weaknesses teams and individuals overall, especially as more time passes and more data is processed. It has become increasingly useful for coaches to analyse the joint, muscle, heart, respiratory, cadence and endurance parameters of their athletes, not only for performance, but most critically for health and wellbeing purposes. Understanding these parameters will improve sporting performance over time as data is amassed, but it could also facilitate optimum health levels and longevity of sporting careers.

Catapult Sports is a pioneer in the wearable tech sphere; they’ve identified the void of miscommunication lying between sport and technology– which for some reason, no one else has. However most importantly, they’ve established exactly where, how and why this void needs filling. Catapult specialises in wearable tracking equipment that records and processes an athlete’s real-time performance, and their technology and data analytics are currently used by more than 500 organizations across the NFL, NBA, English Premier League, AFL, NRL and others. They are currently focusing on expanding their presence into other significant markets, such as the US National Collegiate Athletic Association and European Football Leagues. Catapult technology is empowering elite coaches across the world with data metrics and scientific insight into their players and teams, enabling an advancement in athletic performance that has previously been impossible. The wearable technology that they are producing supplies objective information on athlete risk potential, game-readiness and where relevant, capability of returning to play. The company’s roots lie in the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) and scientific research organizations, the combination of which provides an all-encompassing solution to next-level athlete management. The company offers a range of products for both indoor and outdoor sports, plus a comprehensive software analytics package.

Their most widely used product is the OptimEye system, which works by fitting a small sensor device in a player’s jersey on their upper back. The sensor tracks the player’s position in real-time, and then based on performance elements, provides a feed-back in 3D positioning. OptimEye measures an athlete’s acceleration, strength ability and scope of movement, all of which is mapped using GPS technology combined with vital monitoring. Their accelerometers, magnetometers and gyroscopes not so different from what you’d find in smartphones, which generally are now capable of tracking gravitational load, distance and direction data. However unlike a smartphone, Catapult isolates performance data using filters to pinpoint an athlete’s exact direction for each acceleration or step. For indoor tracking, Catapult deploys internal stadium antennas to pick up frequencies from athletes in real-time, providing a localized, indoor GPS-type solution for hockey and basketball teams without requiring satellite help. Their product, ClearSky, is an example of such a local positioning system. It pinpoints movement traces in each player and combines them with with next-level, micro-movement analysis, enabling an end-to-end solution for measuring performance and tactical output in-play. Catapult hails ClearSky as the most accurate positioning device on the market, with 10cm positional accuracy. Their other products include, GPSSports EVO, OptimEye X4, S5.

Moore’s law and related technical details

The use of GPS technology to monitor athletic performance in training and competition has become almost ubiquitous, particularly in professional sport. Sensors and GPS provide the main tech stack for Catapult, and as GPS technology has evolved over the last decade, coaches have access to an abundance of metric data from which they can augment training processes. The volume of metric data can be overwhelming however, and the user faces the challenge of selecting which data points are most appropriate in a sporting context, followed by how to interpret it to derive value. Given the role of individual fitness levels in moderating sporting ability and capacity for physical exertion, it would seem intuitive to evaluate the athletes’ GPS data in relation to their fitness profile.

It is important to note that tracking and sensor devices provide information beyond distance-based data, but as this is the most easily abundant and transferrable data derived from the sensor, it can be used to establish other integral parameters such as velocity, acceleration and other derivatives (including time and distance spent at a certain speed).

Sport-tech researchers are introducing other concepts, such as measuring distance in acceleration bands. This is the process of combining acceleration and velocity data (known as ‘metabolic power’) and individualizing traditional speed zones for each player. With the abundance of research on the topic, the decreasing cost of production (directly resultant of Moore’s Law) and increasing performance of hardware, we expect Catapult to be able to deliver even more sophisticated analytics in no time, with the potential to expand to developing countries as well. Furthermore, the innovative combination of cloud-computing technology and smartphone communication networks are making training data more readily available and easy to analyse, which will undoubtedly facilitate significant growth in valuation for global sporting markets. The real value of sports analytics lies in the predictive capabilities provided. The best sports teams are the ones using the power of real-time information to their advantage. As the technology improves, these devices will continue to combine features and increase potential application. The Catapult wearable technology is ideal for its purpose from both an analytics and practicality perspective; it is fully functional in real-time on a tablet from the bench at any sporting even, enabling smarter decisions from the coaching staff instantaneously.

Metcalfe’s law and Analytics

The power of data analytics are essentially synonymous with the power of the network from which said data is derived; in other words, analytics rely on Network Effects, or Metcalfe’s Law. Accordingly, it is very likely that Catapult Sports will totally eradicate market competitors due to their monopolization of network effects. Sports analytics are also used for creating Fantasy Leagues, giving fantasy ‘players’ access to statistics that enhances their play of the game. It is used to improve scouting– detecting new, unusual talent and evaluating these anomalous players’ competitive capability. Coaches gain competitive advantage amongst teams when they present statistical analysis about the players they represent. This data can be mined to identify countless performance benchmarks, improve game strategy, make teams smarter and keep players in play longer. Fantasy sports leagues are still a growing field, so the real potential of analytics could potentially lie with fans looking for a deeper breakdown of the game, or teams pursuing performance improvements. Both, however, will be resultant of Network Effects.

Metcalfe’s Law is also evident in the formation of group Network Effects. With each subsequent player on the field, more data is generated, ingested and analysed. Thus, the network gets larger and so the precision of analysis augments. Each training session performed by each member of the network subsequently strengthens the performance of the entire team. All of this activity is overseen by the coach who plays the role of ‘super node’, or network fulcrum, as he controls the dashboard and analytics of each individual and therefore the team as a whole.

Power law and first mover advantage

The key to building technology for committed pro-athletes is to develop hardware and software solutions that solve real problems they experience. The wearable-tech market is predominantly funded by multinational apparel companies such as Adidas, Nike and Reebok, all of whom possess close to unlimited capital. As Catapult only has hardware and software production to focus on, they consistently attract capital investment from such commercial giants who are in need of their specific services. This is another contributing factor to Catapult’s monopoly of the wearable-tech market; they hold a huge advantage over their market competitors due to their exclusive focus on cutting-edge innovation. The company’s wearable devices can calculate athletes’ workloads, training volumes and physical exertion, all of which their competitors have not quite yet achieved. We believe Catapult is the real Category King when it comes to performance-wearable tech, measurable alone from the vast number of teams who are currently using their technology. Their recent acquisitions further strengthen their gold-standard status in the industry. Last year, they acquired Boston-based XOS Digital, a market leader in video-based technology, for US$60 million. Catapult’s mission to be the Category King for monitoring athletic performance (at all levels across all sports) is bolstered by their acquisition of XOS, as they are now capable of amalgamating leaders of wearable and video technology– the two pillars of technology in elite club environments. They are set to pioneer the development of next-generation products for elite sports which look to integrate performance data with video analytics, which will strengthen their potential for global expansion via the strategic positioning of their operational platform. The company’s second acquisition for FY16 was PlayerTek, an Irish company developing a GPS tracking technology engineered for amateur athletes. This smart move enables Catapult to monopolize the wearable-tech game not only in pro-athletics, but also in every amateur athletic venture– the supply of which is basically infinite. Ultimately, Catapult technology has the potential to be deployed all the way from top-tier international sporting giants to everyday members of the general public, which will certainly solidify their status as the ultimate Category King in their market.

Catapult Sports at SXSW 2017

Conclusion and recommendations

Conclusively, there is a huge niche to be filled in sophisticated sports-analytics. Catapult is the main provider of sophisticated sports-wearables, but the indispensible value lies in the access to data analytics that these wearables generate. The company has positioned itself as the sole leader on the market, which is evident from the popularity it has gained in the last couple of years from many major sports leagues all over the world. The most significant growth in the industry is driven by the smartphone innovation combined with social media reach, as well as cloud-computing innovation and ultimately, the combination of all three. In accordance with Moore’s Law, Metcalfe’s Law and the Power Law, advances in hardware and analytics are only set to accelerate in quality and diminish in cost. This is concurrently applicable to smartphones and tablets, software tools and ultimately, the handling of data-analytics as a whole. And seeing as Catapult’s products are underpinned by all of these technological advances, the only way they can go is up. The sports analytics’ market is set to expand anyway in accordance to the 3 Hacker Laws, but as Catapult’s technological influence is already deep in play, they will emerge as thought– and therefore market– leader in no time at all. If innovation and growth are driven by competition, Catapult will only be propelled forward by other companies trying to compete with them– and, in conjunction, the market will expand as a whole as these subsidiary companies strive to keep up.