Sports Video Understanding
Sports Video Understanding refers to systems that automatically interpret, segment, and reason over sports footage and related visual content—identifying plays, actions, tactics, players, and game states without requiring humans to watch and manually annotate every moment. These applications fuse video, diagrams, scoreboards, and textual commentary into a structured, queryable understanding of what is happening in a game. This matters because sports organizations, broadcasters, betting companies, and fan platforms are increasingly data-hungry but constrained by manual analysis. By turning raw video into structured insights and enabling complex natural-language queries about plays and strategies, these systems unlock scalable analytics, richer live broadcasts, and new interactive fan experiences. Benchmarks like SportR are emerging to measure and improve model performance, helping the ecosystem converge on robust, comparable capabilities for sports analytics, broadcasting, and engagement use cases.
The Problem
“Turn full-game footage into searchable plays, events, and game state”
Organizations face these key challenges:
Analysts spend hours manually tagging clips, possessions, and key events
Highlights and replay packages miss moments or require late-night manual editing
Inconsistent labels across leagues/venues due to different camera angles and overlays