Technology explosion promises to drive Indian sports forward
Megha, CEO & Co-Founder of Stupa Sports Analytics, feels understanding data is the key to breaking barriers and helping players improve performance
two made video and data analysis to help the paddlers. Stupa was established in February 2020, just before Covid froze the world.
“Through video analysis, the players can understand where they are hitting the forehand, backhand and the heat map of the balls. They can evaluate their rallies. They get the data points and evaluation of their foot work, etc. We were working with 40 of the top 100 players in the world. They were also keen to understand their opponents’ strategy,” said Megha.
Analyse and improve
The focus was on helping players and coaches keen to analyse their performance and improve.
“Many coaches did feel that technology would replace them. Yet, we were able to work with many national federations around the world, helping them with real-time analysis of the videos of the matches and practice sessions. For the Tokyo Olympics, we supported close to 25% of the table tennis players but the revenue was not great. It was not exactly the ‘right product market t’. We had to keep evolving. From 2022 till now we have shifted our product base,” said Megha, who has a rich experience as she has worked in HCL, Cognizant, PepsiCo, American Express, World Bank, United Nations on the technology side.
Megha realised how many areas in sports were not technology-driven. “We gured out that there was a huge gap which the federations, league organisers and sports organisations struggled to bridge. There is a huge leakage of data and media because the federations are still maintaining their memberships and data on excel sheets. They are sitting on a large amount of data and media which they are not able to monetise. They are spending money on player development,” she said.
Apart from cricket and football, most of the other sports struggle to get into the limelight as they are not aware of ways to have enough data for fan engagement on television.
“Even in badminton, which is widely played in India now, the world-level tournaments do not have anything other than line-calling ‘in and out’ with technology. There is not much information available for the fans to understand what exactly the players are doing, what the strategy of one player is against the other. The commentators, too, don’t have enough information to talk about. These are the areas we identied,” she said.
“Business started once we solved the puzzle. We now work in more than 15 countries. We started with table tennis and now we are getting ready to step into badminton, pickleball and tennis. We have end-to-end solutions on a SaaS (Software as a Service)-based platform. It helps the federations and league organisers to manage membership, player registrations, tournament management, league management, streaming on the web, managing and curating a layer of AI on top of it which helps them in personalising the data and availing data points for the players, fans and coaches. Through our platform, players can access all their historic information, trends and patterns, how they have been playing, what streams they have been part of, watch their highlights and so on. They can enable monetisation of the data and media from the same platform,” Megha said.
Revenue option
More than being successful in the business of sports through technology, Megha was happy to generate revenue for the sports federations.
“The moment we started doing table tennis, we had soccer and cricket people coming to us and saying, ‘we do have dierent platforms but no end to end platform’. They were having multiple technology partners and struggle integrating them”, she said.
Everything in one platform has been a dream exercise, the strong point of her organisation. Megha pointed out that it was not planned at the beginning, but achieved along the way.
“It was not as if we were enlightened one day that this has to be done. It was a journey. Our second product is focused on fan engagement for the television audience. Doing interesting stats, graphics for the broadcasters. We have done it for table tennis. We will do it for badminton soon. We use AI for personalising and curating the data points for the respective stakeholders, could be fans, coaches, players and the information they should be seeing which is more relevant and more valuable for them. It is more for the fan engagement, doing the real time analysis of the game and putting it, merged with graphics”, she said.
Since the work is done for broadcasters also, the analysis is obviously real time. “We get the analysis in milliseconds and the highlights of the matches right after it is done”, she said.
It has been a roller-coaster for Megha in merging technology with sports, basically solving the problems all along, and helping the growth of the ecosystem.
The video analysis may also soon become real time for the players, thanks to the collaboration with the international federations, which in turn will get a chance to monetise the idea.
“We are also working with world federations. We are trying to implement the idea of putting up our cameras for all