It's not a camera
Spent today sketching out a product that doesn't exist yet. Six documents: technical, market, economics, packaging, competitive comparison, financial model.
By evening it was clear: it's not a camera.
What's on the market today
Look at sports broadcasting for non-top leagues — universities, municipal clubs, amateur associations, academies — and you've got two extremes. Foreign platforms at five-figure dollar prices. Or a volunteer with a phone on a tripod. Nothing in between.
When you actually look at what federations buy, it isn't a camera. They want a system: it accepts the recording, returns the schedule, statistics, highlights, a viewer page, a season archive. The camera is just the entry point.
What I'm actually building
It's an AI system for sports broadcasts. The hard part runs on the phone:
→ Player tracking during the match — no operator needed → Real-time recognition of key moments, on-device, no latency → Highlights cut live, on the phone — not post-processed afterward → Delivery into our own video network with minimal delay → Stats wired to the schedule and team rosters
I've been building this for years — my own video delivery network, my own trained AI recognition models, capacity for thousands of concurrent viewers.
And the hardest part is free.
Free iOS app — but only for registered organizers: leagues, federations, academies. After registration, the operator sets the iPhone on a tripod, taps "start" — the system does the rest.
What the federation pays for
For turning a stream of matches into a product:
→ Season schedule, lineups, notifications → Branded viewer page → Season archive, stats, one-click highlights → Distribution to VK, RUTUBE, Telegram
The kit — iPhone Pro + phone stabilizer + tripod + power bank — runs $1,800-2,400. Two to three times cheaper than a comparable broadcast camera. And one kit works for one league or dozens: the app on the phone doesn't know how many matches are happening that day or in what cities. It records the one it's pointed at.
What already works
Insight — our analytics system for federations — already runs in production.
What's new is the capture and on-device recognition. That's what I was sketching today.
The plan — Liga Zaliva, June 6
By the Liga Zaliva opener on June 6, I'm assembling the first working version: capture, recognition, delivery into the platform. That's the first match where the iPhone goes up and writes into the live system.
Then we run the stack through the whole season, June to September. By end of season there should be a working system with a real match archive and economics that hold up.
After that — we look at who else has a similar pattern: municipal league, school series, regional association, university.