Behind the Box: Streaming from your phone
Adapting our capture philosophy
A large part of our focus at FrogBox has been on making community sports streaming more practical. That has meant reducing the cost and complexity traditionally associated with broadcasting a match, while building technology that can realistically be operated in environments where the person responsible for the stream may also be coaching, volunteering around the venue or even playing in the match themselves.
Our purpose built FrogBox camera has been an important part of that journey and remains the best capture option in many environments. It is designed specifically for community sport, integrates closely with the wider FrogBox platform and removes many of the setup decisions that come with more generic equipment.
As we have started working across more sports, though, it has become increasingly clear that one capture model will not suit every environment or every budget.
Indoor sports and smaller playing areas can be well suited to a phone fixed in position, while larger playing areas may suit someone following the action manually from the sideline. Some organisations are also trying to cover several courts, grounds or teams at the same time, where putting dedicated hardware at every location may simply not be practical.
Cost is inevitably part of that equation. If organisations want to cover more of their sport, the capture model needs to make that possible without the technology or cost becoming the thing that limits them. In some environments that means lowering the cost of capture itself, while in others it means giving organisations more flexibility in how they choose to cover different games, teams or venues.
That thinking has helped shape FrogBox Go Lite, our new mobile app that enables clubs and competitions to live stream sport directly from a compatible smartphone while still connecting the match into the wider FrogBox platform.
“Our aim is to make community sports video easier and more affordable, and part of that is being prepared to keep changing our own approach,” says FrogBox CEO Rob Knee. “Our camera remains the right solution in a lot of environments, but it should not be the only way an organisation can access FrogBox. If a phone is the most practical way to capture a particular game, we want to support that as well.”
What we learned from new sports
Our work with Volleyball WA is a good example of how that thinking developed. We initially started together around outdoor beach volleyball, where the FrogBox camera was a natural fit. The environment suited a fixed camera position and gave us confidence that technology developed primarily around cricket could work effectively in another sport.
Indoor volleyball presented a very different set of conditions. Multiple courts can be operating within the same venue and there is the potential to capture significantly more games across a day. Once we looked at that environment more closely, putting dedicated hardware on every court did not feel like the most practical or affordable approach. A phone positioned courtside started to make much more sense.
That experience has influenced how we approach new sports. We do not want to take what we built for cricket and simply apply it everywhere else. Different sports create different challenges, and our job is to understand those first and then work out where FrogBox can fit.
Head of Commercial Operations Zac Goodchild has been involved in many of those conversations with sporting organisations.
“We see plenty of organisations that already understand the value of video, but the challenge is often finding a model that makes it practical to cover enough of their sport. Volleyball is a good example of that. Our FrogBox camera worked really well, but volleyball tournaments and competitions are often played across multiple courts at the same time, and that's where mobile capture started to make a lot more sense, you get far greater reach across all those courts, and it's a more cost-effective way to cover the whole event rather than just showcourt. Those conversations played an important role in shaping Go Lite..”
FrogBox Go Lite: a new way into the platform
FrogBox Go Lite allows a club or competition to create and start a live stream from a compatible smartphone while still connecting that match into the broader FrogBox experience.
A key part of that is the sport specific layer around the stream. FrogBox already supports more than 20 sports through dedicated graphic modules, helping organisations present matches with the right scores, controls and on screen information for their sport. Where official match and scoring data is available, much of the workflow can still be automated, while users can update score graphics manually where that data is not available. Broadcasts can also include club branding and sponsor assets, with the resulting content flowing through to live streams, replays, highlights and Channels.
There are already plenty of applications capable of sending video from a phone to the internet, so simply building another one was never particularly interesting to us. The opportunity was to combine the accessibility of phone capture with the sport specific experience we have already built around FrogBox, making it possible to support more organisations, sports and environments without starting again each time.