House Basketball - The pitch

Turn the odds against the house with House Basketball.

House basketball - The fun part

The computer vision part is pretty interesting because it involves reconstructing the players’ positions and could move into understanding how posture conveys feeling. The analysis of the computer vision data would also be quite interesting.

House Basketball - The growth potential

I don’t think this has much growth potential in terms of number of clients. The best way to get growth is to move into doing this computer vision and analysis for other sports. It could grow to be a multi-million dollars per year business.

House basketball - The monetization

This is a product whose value decreases with the number of people who use it, so it really may be limited to a few dozen people. It might be best to set this up as a revenue share plan, which makes more sense than charging $100,000 for a piece of software.

House basketball - The idea

Most gamblers often only have data on the wins and losses and score differentials of the teams that they bet on.  There’s much more data available that could improve betting strategies and outcomes including point-by-point summaries of the game. That is what professional gamblers currently have access to, but there’s even more out there if you know how to use computer vision. With a few different camera feeds, it’s possible to reconstruct every player's exact position on the field at every second. These can help answer how many contested shots a star player has been making and how much his teammates have been giving good picks or dribble penetration before kicking it back to the star. With more advanced computer vision, you could see how players’ posture changes when they are up or down and whether they slow down when they are behind by a lot.

With the data the software makes available, it could be possible to accurately determine tendencies of the coaches, such as when they make tactical mistakes and whether they know how to recover when an opponent spots a weakness in their defence. The data could also figure out when refs make mistakes. This could be useful if a ref tends to call a lot of charges and one of the star players for the upcoming game pushes the envelope with charging. There are many small but important things this software would help uncover.

House Basketball - The motivation

Sports betting is big money. Being 10% better at predicting the outcome of sporting events can turn a hobby into a career. Software that can watch games for you and give summaries is clearly a good investment for professional gamblers.