Coming soon to a recreational field backstop near you: A GameChanger live stream via a Pixellot camera.
The Dick’s Sporting Goods-owned youth sports management and streaming platform has partnered with the AI-automated camera firm to outfit youth baseball and softball fields nationwide with Pixellot’s SinglePlay cameras, which are designed for rec competition.
Cameras will be fixed at facilities
Coaches or parents will activate them by scanning a QR code
Game streams will appear in the GameChanger app without setup
Pixellot’s tech will deliver automatic highlights and content to families
Fans at home can watch live streams after a parent or coach activates the camera by scanning the QR code at the field
GameChanger will offer personalized athlete and team experiences in the future
“Being able to watch loved ones play live, even when you can’t be at the field, is no longer a luxury— it’s an expectation at every level of youth sports,” said Sameer Ahuja, President of GameChanger and Senior Vice President at DICK’S Sporting Goods. “We believe that connection matters. When young athletes know their family and friends are watching, it helps keep them engaged and playing, and that belief is what drives our team to deliver solutions that make it possible to stream every game. This offering is an exciting step forward for GameChanger, and we’re excited for the opportunity to partner with Pixellot to make high-quality live streaming more accessible for families and leagues everywhere.”
“Pixellot is proud to embark on an important new partnership with GameChanger, bringing a professional-grade - yet easy to implement and access - streaming platform to community baseball fields nationwide,” said Doron Gerstel, CEO, Pixellot. "We are committed, as a company, to AI technologies that not only empower our partners to capture more games, but bring joy to players and families as only a little league comeback or homerun can do.”
The partnership follows a pilot program earlier this year. The companies said 32 organizations participated, with live stream audience and team follows on GameChanger doubling compared to before Pixellot’s cameras were installed.
Here’s what’s perhaps most interesting: GameChanger says it will cover hardware costs and Pixellot will cover installation for a limited number of early-adopting rec leagues.
Leagues interested in securing an installation can visit the GameChanger Camera Recommendation Tool at GC.com/camera to connect with a specialist.
We had Pixellot’s new North American President, Rob DeSalvo, on the podcast this summer, and he explained why the infrastructure build-out is such a big piece of fixed camera installs. So addressing the long-tail of recreation and community fields is, needless to say, difficult with the wide-range of variables at-play.
I have 2 big takeaways here:
1) Bringing high-end streaming to rec fields
There may not be a more omnipresent consumer streaming solution in youth sports than the GameChanger hood with an iPhone inside, with perhaps the soccer stick (what I call it) coming in a close second. These solutions are easy to set up and work mostly fine.
So this feels like a particularly big deal that GameChanger and Pixellot are taking on this challenge. Not only because it will compel more GameChanger adoption and allow Pixellot to sell more cameras - the exact economics of the partnership are unclear, and muddied slightly by the free install offer to compel adoption - but, if successful, it will also provide a roadmap for the industry on how to equip rec fields with tech typically reserved for indoor facilities or high-throughput tournament venues.
In our Great Youth Sports Facility Survey this summer, we found that only ~15% of facilities even have a fixed camera solution, meaning adoption is almost certainly in the the low single-digits (if it’s a whole number at all!) for rec fields.
2) AI highlights
One line in the press release that particularly jumped out to me: “The integration also lays the foundation for future personalized athlete- and team-level experiences within the GameChanger platform.”.
One of our great trends in youth sports tech is AI unlocking automated highlights. Much like short-form videos are the primary growth area in video consumption, short clips for sports families will be where, I suspect, 80% of viewing time occurs.
This is where the partnership becomes so interesting: One of the problems with AI highlights is identification— literally identifying players involved. GameChanger scorekeeping integration enables more reliable clip generation from either a phone or fixed camera, making things much simpler for baseball and softball. But with Pixellot cameras providing a higher quality feed so the AI can do its thing, and GameChanger providing the distribution, AI highlight packages at the rec level may be ready to scale.
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