What happens when you give the real content problems of Tottenham Hotspur and the San Antonio Spurs to people who have never used ScorePlay, and two days to solve them? At our first hackathon, we found out.
The event ran on October 22 and 23 at The University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, over Austin Grand Prix weekend. The executive teams of both organizations set the briefs. Teams built their answers on ScorePlay’s platform and open API, alongside TwelveLabs’ video intelligence, and by the end they had working solutions
Real problems, real media
Each team worked in a ScorePlay workspace preloaded with Tottenham Hotspur and Spurs Sports & Entertainment media, the same kind of library a sports organization’s content team works from every day. Four in ten of the builders were students, most of them from UT Austin.
The strongest projects took on two of the most pressing challenges in sports media, automated clip production and rights compliance. A highlight loses value with every minute after the moment it captures, and every asset carries limits on where, when and by whom it can be published. Delivering speed without breaking those rules is a problem every sports organization is working on, and these teams built working answers in two days.
Built on the API
Teams built straight on ScorePlay’s open API, and it handled everything they threw at it. That reflects a wider shift in how people build in sports. A growing share of builders start with code and expect to connect, query and ship without a long onboarding process.
For a media platform, that makes the API the front door to the product, and it has to stand up to the fast, unscripted use that two days of hackathon building demand.
Every hour spent building
Just as telling was how the teams spent their time. No one lost hours searching for files, renaming assets or chasing down where footage lived, because the media in ScorePlay was already organized, tagged and searchable. Every hour went into building.
In many sports organizations, finding the right asset is still a job in itself. Remove that friction, and an idea can become a working tool in hours.
“What got me is that they spent zero time hunting for files or cleaning up folders. All of their time went into building. That's the whole reason we started ScorePlay, and I'd never seen it play out quite like this, with people we'd never met building things we hadn't thought of.” [Victorien Tixier, CEO and Co-Founder, ScorePlay]
Thank you
Thank you to Players Fund, TwelveLabs, Texas McCombs School of Business, and Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment for making it happen, and to David Simbandumwe of Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment for guiding the teams and judging the final builds.
If people who had never used ScorePlay could build these tools in two days, imagine what your team could do with it.
