Here are some thoughts based on my live notes and recollection of the Product section of the investor day last Thursday. The focus was team sports, and some pending product updates. My live notes read like a stream of haikus, which I've tried to make some sense out of.

Going in, I didn’t have a thorough understanding of Catapult’s products or the state of the art, so this is just what I picked up or have researched since. Some of you will already be familiar with the background, but I always appreciate when others provide context, so here goes...

For team sports, Catapult product suites are built around the integration and overlaying of various sets of in-play data, so teams can harvest insights and adapt their play. The data originates from sensors on wearables, and from video feeds. It is sent to software that syncs it all and enables advanced sorting and displaying.

There are a few updates coming in April that are about making things incrementally more practical and integrated, with more insightful and user-friendly software. They are incorporating more IoT and Cloud-based applications to have it available anywhere, and available fast. Watching the presentations it was easy to believe that this is the scalable state of the art.

With wearables they collect the movement and biometric data of players. You probably know the gadget that athletes wear on their torso. Depending on the variant, these devises include a GPS tracker, heart rate monitoring and an increasing amount of on-board processing power. There are other wearables in trial phases - they partner with someone who has a shoe insole that measures foot pad pressure points, and I heard something about a sweat sensor.

Video feeds. I’m not sure if they have complete access to live stadium broadcast video on game day, but they do have mobile sideline cameras which are also used on training days. The systems these are part of are being adopted into live in-game coaching decisions, via tablets in the coaches hands.

Software for reviewing. Depending on the use case, dashboards can display player movements or biometric changes synced to video. Presumably there is an evolving range of product formats and uses cases, including a compact tablet version for sideline and ‘on the bus’ use.

Connectivity. Linking it all together involves docking stations for the wearables, relay stations to extend the range of the wearable transmission while in use (soon to be with a 400m range), and the IoT and cloud computing infrastructure to transmit data and update software.

Product updates April

The end users do include analysts, but most important are the coaches and players. They have spent their lives playing sport, and need an intuitive software interface.

So one coming update is a video analysis software refresh to replace Thunder which is what American Football and Hockey have been using for 10 years. One use case is when a coach wants to find and replay on the sideline, while another is when a player needs to study something on the bus. The update includes a search wizard for isolating play types for study, and the ability to view multiple angles simultaneously. They’ve been in conversation with teams since January. Users were nervous about change but excited once they saw it.

They are integrating broadcast quality graphics such as spotlights, to make it easier to keep the attention of teenage athletes. 

One of the pain points is data upload time, so they are increasing use of IoT and cloud to make it faster and then available anywhere. I guess the global pain point is ‘I want it now’, so they are making more replay capabilities available ‘live’.

On Friday they also announced Vector 8, an impressive sounding wearable iteration.

Sales cycle and upgrade round: Teams will talk and try all throughout the in-season, and then buy and adopt quickly during off-season. So rollouts will often be in a particular sports off-season.

Sports tech macro view: They outlined the industry disruption arc from other tech companies like Netflix - First digitise, next optimise for the new format, Lastly, transform the industry. They view sport tech as being somewhere in optimise. Someone will eventually have a ‘Moneyball moment’, when they figure out how to use this tech to win their league against all the odds. That will signal the transformation stage.

Competition

Wearables: No one is at their level on the wearables front. The sum of all their competitors’ market share is a fraction (A fifth??) of theirs. A new sale is usually a team who has never used an integrated wearables system.

Data: They have a huge lead in the size of their data lake and the insights gleaned across multiple sports. 

Video analysis: Every team already uses some kind of video analysis. So every new sale is a conversion from a competitor. The Catapult edge is the integration of the data from the wearables and the appeal of the platform ecosystem. Coaches move, and coaches who are familiar request their tech at the new place.

Partner verses acquire: They will need to stay at the front with technology. They are wary of becoming a king-maker with their platform, so acquisitions would be made as required, partnerships where acceptable. 

This will be a winner takes most market, but never a winner takes all. They have 20% of professional teams, and I think I heard 60% is achievable. Why not 100%? Because sports is by nature competitive, and teams will always be experimenting with new ideas to find an edge.

An equity analyst at the seminar asked a question about ’the threat of LLMs’ and the CEO response was - not worried, it’s about the data collection at one end, and the user-friendly interface at the other. A coach doesn’t want to have a ‘natural-language’ conversation with a computer. He wants to scroll forward and backwards, and in the latest update, click through a tailored filtering wizard to isolate categories of in-game situations and then bring up relevant recordings. LLMs will be happy to partner with Catapult.

So it looks like they've got a solid lead, but we should keep an eye on the competition especially in some corners of the market. There are some corners that are naturally… harder to corner….for example, one equity analyst asked something about scouting (for talent) software and while I didn’t catch the answer I imagine this mostly falls into video analysis, since you can’t have your wearables on every prospect.