SVG Sit-Down: Stats Perform's Brian Orefice on How Player Tracking With AI, Remote-Based Technology Is Possible The company's AutoStats solution is having a big impact this college-hoops season By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital
Wednesday, March 13, 2024 - 9:20 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
Over the past decade, player tracking has become ubiquitous across major sports in the U.S. The hard work and technology behind those systems have ushered in a new era of not just smarter statistics for coaches and players but deep reservoirs of graphical data for live sports broadcasting.
Player (and ball) tracking typically requires a complex infrastructure at stadiums and arenas. However, Stats Perform has been finding success with its newest solution, AutoStats, in enabling remote player tracking with the assistance of AI. It essentially makes it possible to track a game from anywhere without any hardware in the venue.
AutoStats has found success for some NBA teams on the coaching side and is making waves for broadcasters in college basketball. SVG sat down with Brian Orefice, VP, product, U.S. sports, Stats Perform, to get a better understanding of the solution, how it's migrating to broadcast, and what's next for the technology.
How does AutoStats work? What do you provide, and how is it sourced?
The idea of AutoStats is easy to grasp, although the concept belies its complexity behind the scenes. Simply put, it's a broadcast-based tracking solution. Essentially, leveraging our expertise with computer vision and AI, we are able to create outputs that are similar to extremely costly in-venue camera/server systems but [don't come with] the hassle and expense of stadium installations and hardware maintenance.
Our only requirement: standard broadcast video. We run that video through a CV process that automatically tracks all the players and calibrates their position from the screen to the court. From there, we sync it with our play-by-play event data and use positional modeling to automatically determine events like isolations, drives, post-ups, and screens.
When armed with good tracking data, you're limited only by your imagination as to what you want to analyze. Contested vs. uncontested shots? Catch-and-shoot vs. off-the-dribble? Rebounding-crash percentages? And that's to stay nothing of metrics that can be surfaced on defense, where typical quantitative statistics really fall short.
How challenging is it to expand an analytics service initially designed and used for scouting and make it something that the average fan would find engaging and entertaining? What stats or deep analytics have you found to be valuable in parsing?
When we initially pitched ideas to broadcasters and their social teams, the initial feedback was that we were coming in with concepts too advanced for the average fan. For a broadcast in particular, you get only 20-30 seconds to make your point and move on. It's critical that the point is organic to the moment and drives storytelling. We often found ourselves balancing the lure of pushing advanced and differentiated data with the requirement that those insights needed to be digestible.
Perhaps our most successful happy medium was the use of heat maps, which harnessed the power of raw data with sleek visualization. The most obvious difference between standard event data and tracking data is knowing the x/y coordinates of players. We took that information and created various heat maps that are quite insightful, like showing where a player is over the course of a game or season when he or she has the ball. Getting creative with relatively simple concepts leveraging data that has not been collected before - what's the average shot-clock time before a team shoots, what percentage of passes led to a basket, how long does a player hold the ball for before shooting or passing? - solves the broadcast use case.
In your initial trials of expanding the service, what obstacles did the development team need to overcome? How were they overcome?
As with any technical innovation, being able to ultimately operate efficiently, accurately, and at scale is the key to long-term success. The company made a very deliberate pivot to technology-based solutions after being acquired by Vista, but it required a lot of work to get to where we are now.
Basic things like producing flexible but reliable court-calibration models, improving our automated player tracks to more seamlessly handle visual occlusions, and evolving our proprietary tooling so we could better operationalize our pipeline have been critical. You need a lot of data to create good models, and a ton of elbow grease went into that, particularly early on, when we were starting from scratch.
It helps that we've worked closely throughout with the Orlando Magic, who have been with us since the beginning of AutoStats. They've been a great partner, helped us create event definitions, and have put our data through the ringer for half a decade now as an integral part of their scouting process. They've also pushed us to expand our coverage from strictly college games to over 15 different leagues/competitions. Given the various court markings and rules sets, that presented some initial challenges, but we had a strong foundation in place - and learned a lot of lessons as part of the initial build-up - so we had a pretty good idea what we had to do to broaden the offering.
How do you see sports storytelling evolving, and what role does advanced data play?
Data for data's sake is just noise. Storytelling is the true key to engagement. But, if done right, what better way to tell a story - particularly a sports story - than with numbers?
Advanced data offers so much more context and precision than traditional data, and the number of stories and insights
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
13/05/2026
New Adobe Premiere Color Grading Mode Accelerated on NVIDIA GPUs
Joel Pennington May 13, 2026
0 Comments
New NVIDIA RTX-accelerated features streamlin...
13/05/2026
Grass Valley announced that dB Broadcast has delivered new IP-based outside broadcast (OB) trucks for Cloudbass, featuring Grass Valley LDX 100 Series cameras a...
13/05/2026
Ikegami will exhibit the latest additions to its wide range of broadcast production cameras, control units, viewfinders and monitors on stand 5D3-1 at Broadcast...
13/05/2026
FISE, working with the founding members of the XR Sports Alliance (XRSA), Accedo, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and HBS, have collaborated to develop an immersive...
13/05/2026
Canon Unveils New EOS R6 V Full-Frame EOS Camera and RF20-50mm F4 L IS USM PZ Bu...
13/05/2026
Boston Conservatory at Berklee Honors Beth Morrison and Moses Pendleton at Comme...
13/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
13/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
13/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
13/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
13/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
13/05/2026
Creative software developer Foundry today announced the latest developments on Nuke Stage. A purpose-built application for end-to-end virtual production and in-...
13/05/2026
A definitive portrait of one of Ireland's most influential musicians
New TV documentary airs Monday 18 May on RT One and RT Player at 9.35pm
Watch the...
13/05/2026
Agentic AI is changing the way users get work done. Following the success of OpenClaw, the community is embracing new open source agentic frameworks. The latest...
13/05/2026
Reinforcement-learning agents - AI systems that learn by trial and error - can c...
12/05/2026
Beyond the Hype: A Strategic Post-Hoc Analysis of NAB 2026 If NAB Show 2026 had an underlying theme, it was a quiet, industry-wide pivot from the high-energy sp...
12/05/2026
Guntermann and Drunck (G&D), a Panoptec Technologies Group company, and CT Square, led by Chandresh Shah, have announced a joint venture to distribute G&D and V...
12/05/2026
With 30 days until the start of the FIFA World Cup 2026, Telemundo, the exclusive Spanish-language home of the tournament in the United States, has announced th...
12/05/2026
The NHL has announced the return of Stanley Pup for its third consecutive year, a 90-minute special featuring adoptable rescue dogs competing on a miniature rin...
12/05/2026
NBCUniversal presented its 2026 Upfront to advertisers at Radio City Music Hall, detailing upcoming programming across NBC, Peacock, Bravo, and Versant properti...
12/05/2026
FOX Sports has announced funding for the Fandom and Social Connection Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Publ...
12/05/2026
TNDV and Live Media, both divisions of Live Media Group, supported live broadcast coverage around NCAA Final Four weekend in Indianapolis, including the March M...
12/05/2026
The European Football Alliance (EFA) has announced a content distribution agreement with Fubo Sports Network, the free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channel ...
12/05/2026
For the first time, Spanish-speaking fans in the U.S. will have two separate tel...
12/05/2026
CP Communications led a comprehensive spectrum management initiative on behalf of Churchill Downs during Kentucky Derby week, coordinating RF assets across the ...
12/05/2026
LiveU has announced a strategic partnership with DRONERESPONDERS, a 501(c)3 non-...
12/05/2026
Open Broadcast Systems has announced that BMC TV, a specialist in IP transport of broadcast content, has selected the Open Broadcast Systems 5G Flyaway solution...
12/05/2026
NEP Europe, part of NEP Group, has announced it will deliver broadcast solutions...
12/05/2026
Grass Valley has announced continued collaboration with Ravensbourne University ...
12/05/2026
Stats Perform has announced the launch of Opta Pulse, an AI-assisted video creation and distribution platform for leagues, rights holders, and broadcasters. The...
12/05/2026
FOX Sports has announced a collaboration with Sesame Workshop to integrate Sesame Street characters into FOX Sports' FIFA World Cup 2026 programming. Conten...
12/05/2026
To date, NHL Productions has produced 19 broadcasts with commentary in American Sign Language
NHL in ASL (American Sign Language) may be just one show, but the...
12/05/2026
Google's Brian Albert: creators, athletes, highlights, nostalgia, second-scr...
12/05/2026
A still from Past Lives by Celine Song, an official selection of the Premieres program at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. (Courtesy of Sundance Institute | p...
12/05/2026
Spotify is where fans and artists come together, turning discovery into somethin...
12/05/2026
Features patented Marco-MMC clocking technology
Black Lion Audio's latest release combines the company's expertise in clocking with their renowned p...
12/05/2026
New Track Panel, sequencer upgrades & more
Following their recent public beta release, Reason Studios have announced the full release of Reason 14. With the...
12/05/2026
One month to go! SBS reveals expansive FIFA World Cup 2026 lineup beyond the pi...
12/05/2026
Rohde & Schwarz presents its advanced solutions for power electronics testing at...
12/05/2026
aconnic AG (ISIN: DE000A0LBKW6), Munich, has developed a modified fund raising p...
12/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/05/2026
Tyrell Corporation, specialists in high-end live sports and entertainment broadcasts, was tasked with delivering compelling broadcast coverage of premier equest...
12/05/2026
Registration is now open for IBC2026 as the global media, entertainment and technology community prepares to converge on the RAI Amsterdam from 11 14 September ...
12/05/2026
Ross Video, a global leader in live video production technology, will present its latest innovations and integrated production workflows at BroadcastAsia 2026, ...
12/05/2026
500 selected leaders from around the world across start-ups, corporates, and venture capital. Over 50bn in assets under management among attending investors, a...
SVG Sit-Down: Stats Perform's Brian Orefice on How Player Tracking With AI, Remote-Based Technology Is Possible The company's AutoStats solution is having a big impact this college-hoops season By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital 
