Pixellot is scoring with vision AI — making it easier for organizations to deliver real-time sports broadcasting and analytics to viewers across the globe.
A member of the NVIDIA Metropolis vision AI partner ecosystem, the company based near Tel Aviv offers an AI-powered platform that automates the capturing, streaming and analysis of sporting events.
It’s changing the game for fans, coaches and players of nearly 20 different sports — not just basketball and soccer but also rugby and handball — as it broadcasts events and provides analytics from more than 30,000 venues across 70+ countries. In the U.S., Pixellot powers the broadcasting of over a million games every year through its partnership with the NFHS Network, a leader in streaming live and on-demand high school sports.
Through its broadcasting partners like the NFHS Network, MLB and others, Pixellot provides professional analytics, post-match breakdowns and highlights based on jersey numbers with shot charts and heat maps — which can be especially useful for coaches and players of school and pro sports alike as they study their moves to up their game. It also enables interactive experiences for users, who can manipulate viewframes and cut their own highlights for a game.
Recently, SuperSport Schools, a company based in Cape Town, South Africa, deployed the Pixellot platform to power an app that broadcasts student athletics across the nation, where more than 1,500 high schools are active in sports.
“Our goal is to democratize the coverage of sports with the help of AI and automation,” said Yossi Tarablus, who leads marketing at Pixellot, a member of the NVIDIA Inception program for cutting-edge startups. “Using the NVIDIA Jetson platform for edge AI, Pixellot brings powerful technology for sports broadcasting and analytics to some of the world’s most remote areas.”
How Pixellot Works
During peak sports seasons, about 200,000 games a month are broadcasted across the globe using the Pixellot platform, according to Tarablus.
Lightweight Pixellot cameras powered by NVIDIA Jetson capture high-quality video of games, matches and even practices — and livestream them in high definition to users through an app in real time with an overlaid scoreboard, live stats, commentary and more.
The platform creates an automatic viewframe that simulates a camera operator, optimizes videos and corrects scene lighting using NVIDIA RTX ray-tracing technology.
In addition, the platform helps organizations and companies monetize sports while making them more accessible to viewers, as it enables over-the-top, or OTT, streaming — direct streaming over the internet without the need for a traditional cable or satellite TV provider.
In all of its camera setups, the Metropolis member runs the NVIDIA DeepStream software development kit for AI-powered video streaming analytics. And the company relies on the NVIDIA TensorRT SDK for high-performance deep learning inference.
“NVIDIA Jetson made it possible for Pixellot to create the most accurate and affordable AI-powered camera solution for broadcasting live sporting events,” said Gal Oz, chief technology officer and cofounder of Pixellot. “The versatility of Jetson modules in terms of camera pipeline, encoders and AI capabilities enabled Pixellot to develop multiple products based on the same hardware and software platform.”
Broadcasting South African School Sports
High-quality, real-time broadcasts of athletics are difficult to produce without access to a slew of graphics and data.
As the NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX module enables AI-powered video processing and GPU-accelerated computing right at the edge — on the field or at courtside — Pixellot lets organizations broadcast sports from anywhere.
“It’s amazing how many people have told us stories about a moment they were empowered to share with their children thanks to SuperSport Schools and Pixellot, because they couldn’t be there physically but were present through live or on-demand video,” said Kelvin Watt, managing director of Capitalize Media and SuperSport Schools, on the Pixellot deployment in South Africa.
The SuperSport Schools app, which is free and recently reached 600,000 subscribers, was the first to broadcast a junior nationals track race in the country.
At the event last year, a student named Viwe Jingqi broke 50-plus-year national records for both the 100- and 200-meter races for South African girls under 18 years old. People all over the world could easily witness these historic victories through the SuperSport Schools app, powered by Pixellot.
Building a Smart Sports City in China
In China, tech giant Baidu and the Chengdu Sports Authority are using Pixellot technology in an initiative to develop a smart sports city, with an initial focus on broadcasting community soccer.
Chengdu, the capital of southwestern China’s Sichuan province, is a sports-oriented city and was the host of this year’s World University Games, an event sanctioned by the International University Sports Federation.
“Pixellot’s AI-driven sports production solutions are a perfect fit for our strategic vision of delivering innovative technology solutions to communities,” said Liu Chuan, solution director of the intelligent cloud sports industry at Baidu.
“Broadcasting community soccer with vision AI is part of the Chengdu initiative’s efforts to emphasize the health benefits of engaging in sports recreationally,” said Tarablus. “It moves the spotlight from pro or Olympic sports to the importance of athletics for all.”
Learn more about the NVIDIA Metropolis application framework, developer tools and partner ecosystem.