Overtime developed Flashback technology to capture and buffer 12-second sports highlights
Zach Wiener · a16z Podcast | Eyeballs on the Game · Jan 2, 2019 · at 15:59
Zach Wiener, co-founder of digital sports media startup Overtime, explains the proprietary buffering software Overtime developed to capture unpredictable high school sports plays.
0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 17.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The problem with highlights is you never know when the good play is going to happen. So we built a technology we call flashback where the game is streaming through memory the whole time. It's not saving it because we don't live stream games, but when something happens, you press a button and it goes back 12 seconds, and it lifts it, and it sends it automatically to our server.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Zach Wiener
Wiener: iPhone sports footage outperforms professional camera clips on Instagram
“There are some plays that we have that are shot both with an iPhone and a real camera, and we've tested this on Instagram, and it actually performs better when you shoot it with an iPhone.”
Zach Wiener: Declining sports TV viewership is not predetermined
“I don't think that it's predetermined that viewership will go down, and there are some stats that point the other way. The NFL, this past weekend, viewership was up compared to last year, so I don't think there is a 100% chance that viewership continues to go …”
Wiener: Simply streaming linear TV sports feeds on Facebook fails
“MLB, their idea of broadcasting baseball games with Facebook was to just put the broadcasting And put it on Facebook. And I don't think that that works. Like the people that are on Facebook, they know that the game is on TV. They're just not turning it on. So …”
Wiener: Overtime chooses coverage based on athlete authenticity, not skill
“The social cachet that these guys have, that's actually how we decide who we want to cover, not necessarily by who's the best, it's who's the most interesting and authentic to this audience.”