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Comment by eaganr | Hacker News Reader

My site (http://eaganr.com/nba/) used to do this. But they changed up their video URLs, wondering how Matetricks gets the new URLs.

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I didn't build this, it's a site that's been trending on my news feed. Two people in my network built it over a weekend.

I would tell those 2 guys to build this out including parts that should be there but they need the data, etc, targeting it as a value-add service that Disney can sell to ESPN subscribers. Done properly with multiple sports over multiple years and consistent annotations, I would think sports fans would go nuts over this, wouldn't they? (Any sports fans here?) Like, think of the ability to jump immediately to the video of most any noteworthy event in a sports event in recent history - "hey, remember that time PlayerX did that funny fake tag out to PlayerY? Hey let's pull that up and watch it, grab this slider you can move it back and forth to see exactly how he pulled off that trick, hahaha awesome".

I think Disney has plenty enough in-house talent and they're usually pretty forward thinking, it's surprising they haven't done something along these lines.

I used to work at ESPN.com. My job application was a proof of concept of a similar idea, but because it was 2002 and wasn't possible to build technically it was designed to show that I could code and think creatively about consuming sports online.

When I took the job, the realities of licensing footage hot hard: the leagues were not keen on letting a third party like ESPN have historical, searchable footage like this available on demand. The leagues were still figuring not how to make money from digital and rights to their games are the biggest asset they have.

Things have changed since then but the tl; dr is that from 2002-2005 the reason this wasn't built by ESPN was not technical or due to a lack of imagination, but a business reason - it was prohibitively expensive / impossible to get licensing rights from the leagues.

I can see it working. Especially if it's community driven. Like use AI/machine learning to create the foundation for recognizing what event corresponds to which scene, and then have viewers be tagging or writing comments while the video is rolling

We're building exactly what you're describing at http://www.swish.io (available on both ios and android) We organize clips by plays, teams, and games and annotate videos using the meta data from the play-by-play. We even have the slo-mo slider capabilities you mention, if you check out our app you can press down on any video and move your finger back and forth to watch in slo-mo (works much better on iOS at the moment).

We source our content from social media, not from the league's sites so we do not have every play but we have a lot. Usually 30 or more per game.

If you're a sports fans try it out would love to hear your feedback!

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