iSportsAnalysis takes athletic evaluation into the cloud with AWS

Technological innovations have taken sports performance analytics into a new stratosphere. Sports organisations, coaches, and players can now easily access a host of tools to more effectively evaluate and improve player and team performance. Sports performance software provider iSportsAnalysis addresses some of the most pressing analytics challenges that sports clubs face today.

The iSports Analysis service creates a synchronised set of XML data along with a video asset to provide sports organisations with a robust game analysis toolset. Recently, iSportsAnalysis moved its solution from on premises to the cloud with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), electing to also use AWS Media Services for video transcoding and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for greater efficiency and elasticity.

iSportsAnalysis CEO Anadi Taylor then began to envision a more cost-effective solution to meet the increasing demand. Drawing on his background in programming and live streaming, he studied existing solutions, identified gaps in functionality, and interviewed coaches, sport scientists, and analysts to uncover their specific needs.

The resulting solution, iSportsAnalysis, has been used in real-time matches since 2017. Since then, Taylor and his team have continued to refine the solution, adding an online messaging system, synchronised video and analysis, filtering options, playlist generation, and more.

Taylor migrated iSportsAnalysis into the AWS Cloud from a rented server. Commenting on the experience, he said, “transferring to running Amazon EC2 instances was easy and super-fast; I was ready to go in a few hours. We even moved our transcoding over to AWS Elemental MediaConvert and I’ve never looked back. I also love that AWS tools give us the ability to regularly bring new features to our clients.”

iSportsAnalysis also migrated from a MySQL database service, hosted on Amazon EC2, to using Amazon Aurora. “The transition was incredibly smooth and the backup functionality, failure detection, and scalability has proved invaluable, let alone the time savings,” Taylor added.