Introducing: Video Growler

By Dan

In half a year we have watched you - the HomeField Coaches and Athletes - write thousands of comments about the video that you have uploaded.  With time-coded comments, these discussions interactively played back the video at the exact moment you wanted to discuss.  Hitting the play button didn't make it obvious that additional insights and discussions were taking place though.  So we fixed that last week with the launch of the Video Growler...

When you play back your video, and hit a point where a teammate or coach has added a comment, the comment will growl in the upper right corner of your browser.  Click the comment to go directly to that part of discussion, or click the time-code to repeat that part of the video.

I love the growler.  I built it.   But I'd love to hear from you, so please tell us what you think!

NYC Sports Startups FTW: GameChanger

By Reece

Since we started Overtime Media two years ago we've met some great people along the way, especially some cool startups. In particular, we've had a kinship with the guys at GameChanger - one of the few other NYC sports startups (that we know of) - that has meant a few meetings and some great knowledge exchange. If we didn't all work so much, we'd probably hang out a lot more. Alas...

GameChanger is an iPhone app that does mobile scorekeeping and live stats updates (currently just for baseball, but more sports coming I believe). I checked out an early beta, and it's pretty rad. Here's a great blog post from founder Ted Sullivan as they really get going...

We like these guys because they're former athletes/sports obsessed techies like us, who understand the importance of using technology to improve the experience of coaches, players and fans alike.

So, congrats to our buddies - Ted, Kiril and Calvin. Keep up the great work! You can download GameChanger for your iPhone here.

Finally, if you're a sports startup - in NYC or otherwise - hit us up! We're always open to talk about our industry.

Stale Accounts Removed

By Dan

We introduced HomeField 2.0 (the HomeField you all know and love today) after the end of our inaugural season last spring.  This major upgrade included many improvements, but a small amount of cruft from the old version remained, including a few hundred unused accounts.  I removed these stale accounts about an hour ago.

Although I'm confident that no active user accounts were deleted, I wanted to share this update with our community, in case anybody was affected.  So, if you can no longer log in to your HomeField account, and resetting your password does not work, please drop me a line.

p.s. First post (of the new year)!

On Over Engineering

By Dan

During our meeting with Fred Wilson last week he mentioned something fairly obvious about our company: we have too few engineers (i.e. just me). He was making the point that one particular path for our company could see it thrive (netting a few million a year in profits) with a small 10-12 person staff (7 engineers or so). But it started me thinking about it from the other angle: what if we had too many engineers?

I firmly believe one of the reasons startups create some of the most beautiful and expertly crafted products is that they have limited resources with which to produce them. Startups therefore, by necessity, build only to create value and build the smallest solution possible. This viewpoint is bolstered by 37signals’ Getting Real, Paul Graham in many of his excellent essays, and the principle of least effort (or path of least resistance, if you will). It’s why Rob Pacheco (a chef) says, “to find the most efficient way to accomplish a task, give it to the laziest guy in the kitchen.”

Conversely, when a startup grows (or starts) too big, it produces decreasingly beautiful products. Engineers, by definition, like to engineer. An average engineer - which most of them are, by definition of the word average - will not achieve perfection. Since these engineers have to do something with their time, the company they work for ends up with an over-engineered product (by definition!). It is the rare exception (i.e. Apple) that can produce many beautiful products by the labor of many engineers.

-A Lazy Engineer

Originally posted here.

How @OvertimeMedia relates to Paul Graham's "Startups in 13 Sentences."

By Reece

Note: I just noticed some of the formatting is messed up. I’ll fix it in a minute...

I love Paul Graham’s essays. He consistently posts excellent thoughts on start-ups. I was reading his recent post about Determination, when I started across some of his older posts.

A favorite is Startups in 13 Sentences. Here’s how @OvertimeMedia fits into his picture:

1. Pick good cofounders.

I couldn’t be happier with my co-founders - @Spinosa and @JoeYevoli, and our first key employees @patrickohearn and @nromeo. Passionate, determined, intelligent. I love my team.

2. Launch fast.

In the last year, we’ve launched launched multiple versions of HomeFieldwith a complete re-writing of the application this summer. We’ve also built two other beta products. Paul’s right. You don’t really start working until you’ve launched.

3. Let your idea evolve.

HomeField has drastically changed since our initial concepts. We don’t say yes to every feature request, but we listen to our user feedback and use it to evolve HomeField accordingly.

4. Understand your users.

We love user feedback, but sometimes it’s not exactly clear. Users don’t know what’s possible technically, but they know how they work and we look at that and see how we can simplify and streamline the entire process. We’re proud of the changes we’ve made in HomeField 2.0, like scrapping scouting reports for discussions and allowing document and image uploading.

5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.

Totally agree here. We’re big fans of Seth Godin here as well, and the idea is to make a core group of people really love your product first, then allow them to spread the product for you. So far, it’s working. And to those early users, thank you!

6. Offer surprisingly good customer service.

I grew up in my family’s restaurant. It’s a fine dining establishment, and great customer service is one of our best qualities. We try to mimic that here at Overtime Media and we try to make ourselves perosnally available to all of our users. It’s easier at the beginning, but we are committed to maintaining the highest level of service as we scale.

7. You make what you measure.

We figured this one out recently, and we’ve started acquiring customers without any effort on our part. The viral

nature of HomeField is taking effect and we are working ahrd to continue this trend.

8. Spend little.

My mom is an immigrant and my dad is a chef. My mom only spends money when she gets a deal; my dad refuses to pay retail for food. By nature, I’ve been raised to be cheap, and I only spend money when it’s absolutely necessary. Funny thing is, my dad recently called me ”cheap!” I know this goes for my co-founders, too. It’s what has helped us survive this long on seed money.

9. Get ramen profitable.

We’re still working towards this. We’ve got some early revenues, and a LOT of potential in our business model. I can’t wait to get Ramen profitable… then move on to pizza profitable.

10. Avoid distractions.

This one has been tough, and I am personally guilty of it - by keeping a bartending job throughout our start - but it’s afforded me the cash to avoid taking a salary from our precious seed money. It is a distraction, and it’s tough to get up early after a long night behind the bar, but when you love what you do, it’s all worth it. Plus, I’m confident that I won’t be behind the bar too much longer.

11. Don’t get demoralized.

Luckily, long careers in competitive sports have taught us how to cope with this. I’ve had some demoralizing losses in my life as a lacrosse player, but that never stopped me from playing.

12. Don’t give up.

I love this. Giving up is the easy way out. Not for us. We realized that our business is going to change dramatically. That we are going to have a lot of ups and downs, but if we persist and evolve, we will be successful.

13. Deals fall through.

Yeah. We’ve had some deals fall through. It happens. Just like in sports, your opponents are going to score some goals - but if you stay focused and keep working, you’re going to win in the end.

Re: Will the future of TV start with sports? [@bijan]

By Reece

So, I’ve fully bit into DISQUS and really love it. Consequently I’ve been participating in some great discussions online.

Here’s another comment I made on @Bijan’s blog asking “Will the future of TV start with sports?”

Great point about sports advertising, but like Bijan said, the DVR has done a lot of damage here. Last spring, I watched the Celtics in the NBA playoffs solely on DVR. Avoiding tons of ads, but I also had to turn off my phone/Internet to avoid spoilers.

Now, I don’t even own a TV, I’ve just got an iMac (on which the US Open experience is awesome). If the NBA could duplicate (and improve) such a robust viewing experience as this, then I’d be glued to the screen. And of course, same for the NHL and NFL.

I think it’s really about customization. Allow consumers to make choices about their content. Let me watch exactly what I want to watch. If you build a channel for consumers to do this, they will.

Bijan made a point above about piracy/P2P. It’s just like the music industry. People ‘stole’ lots of music, until there was the iTunes store, Amazon, Amie Street etc. Now that there’s a channel to consume legally, there’s a business there. (Just noticed Kirklove’s comment like this above. Total agreement here.)

The SEC almost made a serious mistake in banning social media at games. They have since fixed their mistake and clarified their terms, however, I think they need to go a step further and figure out a way to embrace a group of people (customers) who are so in love with their games (products) that they want to tell everyone about them.

I suppose my overall point is, there is a ton of sports media out there. All of it has value to someone, somewhere. The people in control of this media need to figure out the ways in which they can create value for their fans/customers, and in turn make a tremendous profit as well.

And where is ESPN during all of this? I think ESPN has the potential to become more of a portal or a switcher for the online content. They will act as the great curators of the sports world and people will use ESPN as a gateway… unlesssomeone beats them to it.

Finally, the one thing that sucks about sports video online? The quality is still catching up. This US Open video is great, but from a technical standpoint tennis (and baseball for that matter) are low movement sports making streaming video quality much easier. The good news? This will only continue improving. But for this reason, the NHL will continue to lag behind the other major sports, so I’ll be waiting for the Bruins via iMac a bit longer…

And to actually answer Bijan’s original question. Yes. The future of TV will most definitely start with sports. It is the most engaging content over time, attracting fans year in and year out (I know, I’m a Red Sox fan who rememberswhat it was like before 2004).

Sports on your Calendar

By Reece

Sports and tech for the win! Google Calendar now allows you to add any of your favorite teams' schedules to your calendar. Prior to this, I'd hacked together some schedules on here, but this is a great feature. Thanks Google! (Now get college lacrosse schedules supported, too)!

"Now, when you look under "Other Calendars," click "Add," then "Browse Interesting Calendars" (or use this link to the Calendar directory), you'll find calendars for hundreds of teams in dozens of sports leagues — everything from the National Football League to the Korean FA Cup.

"When you subscribe to your favorite team's calendar, you'll see every game listed, updated in real time with the score as the game progresses."

Original post at the Official Gmail Blog.

HomeField is Disruptive Tech

By Reece

This quote recently came through my inbox via a fellow entrepreneur.

“Disruptive technologies do not immediately replace existing technologies because they are better. In fact, in the beginning, they are worse. They’re just simpler, cheaper, and more convenient. They appeal to the low end of the market (in this case, netbooks), which doesn’t need all the bells and whistles that the high-end needs. They initially gain share in the low end, and the incumbent doesn’t care about losing it because it’s low-margin share. But then… the disruptive products get better and more fully featured and they begin to migrate up to the mid-market. And the incumbent is forced to retreat to the high-margin high-end. And then, eventually, the disruptive product becomes mass market and the incumbent becomes a rickety old colossus that crashes in on itself.” -From TechTicker by Henry Blodget

In the past few days, @JoeYevoli and I have really been brainstorming around our product, HomeField. We have a lot of great users who love our service already, but there are still a lot of coaches sitting on the sidelines, afraid and/or unaware of HomeField can positively impact their life as coaches, and the lives of their players. If Joe has his way, he’ll go to every national coaches’ convention and just say, “This is HomeField. This is what it does. Give me one reason why you wouldn’t use it?”

But this quote has a lot to do with it. We believe we’ve tapped into a market that is rife with over-engineered junk, rooted in hardware that coaches shouldn’t have to deal with. We believe the future is in the cloud and sports media needs to get moving. The players are thirsty for video, coaches need to cut costs but keep up with player demand, administrators need to keep track of all this media, fans want to see it on their phones…

Yeah, HomeField is simple. Like, stupid simple. No unnecessary editing tools, no file format restrictions - we stripped it down to the bare bones, but it does what it needs to do, and it’s awesome at it. Is it a different behavior than usual - putting video online? Yes. But is it more efficient, and more powerful? Yes.

So, really give me one reason why you wouldn’t use HomeField?

Update: @JoeYevoli claims the quote above is a direct bite from Seth Godin. Re-reading it, I certainly agree. It's got Purple Cow written all over it. We're trying to figure it out, but we want to make sure we give credit where credit's due - especially because Godin is the man.