FuboTV says it was the victim of a criminal cyber attack that disrupted its livestream of Wednesday’s World Cup semifinal between France and Morocco. The outage prevented some FuboTV subscribers from being able to watch the entire match amid in-app loading issues.
“On December 14, 2022, the day of the Qatar 2022 semifinal match between France and Morocco, many FuboTV customers experienced issues accessing their accounts,” FuboTV said today in a statement. “The incident was not related to any bandwidth constraints on Fubo’s part. We were instead the target of a criminal cyber attack. Once we detected the attack, we immediately took steps to contain the incident and worked to restore service to all of our users as quickly as possible. Service was fully restored by last evening. We deeply regret the disruption caused by this incident in the meantime.”
FuboTV reported the issue to law enforcement and is now working with cyber security firm Mandiant to assist with its investigation into the attack. FuboTV sent its first tweet acknowledging its World Cup streaming issues on Wednesday at 2:33 p.m. ET, about a half hour after kickoff between France and Morocco. The company shared a link for its subscribers to stream the game directly on Fox Sports, but many Fubo users received error messages when trying to stream the game through that link.
At the 2018 men’s World Cup, fellow streaming service YouTube TV had an outage that prevented fans from watching the semifinal match between Croatia and England, prompting YouTube TV to offer free service for a week to subscribers. FuboTV is also facing a legal dispute with the New York Jets over claims that its now defunct sports betting subsidiary Fubo Gaming failed to pay sponsorship payments to the NFL team.
Serie A is poised to become the first domestic soccer league to implement a version of the FIFA-developed Semi-Automated Offside Technology that debuted at the recently completed World Cup. Multiple reports indicate that it will launch on Jan. 27 in Italy’s top league.
FIFA first tested the Semi-Automated Offside Technology — which uses optical tracking cameras from Hawk-Eye Innovations for precise player positioning — at last year’s Arab Cup and again at February’s FIFA Club World Cup before its grand debut in Qatar. That system also includes a Kinexon sensor embedded in an Adidas ball that syncs the moment of impact for a pass with the player tracking data to help referees make the call more quickly and more accurately. The SAOT system was widely seen as a success at the World Cup with no notable controversy.
SportTechie has learned that Serie A’s Semi-Automated Offside Technology will not initially have the ball tracking sensors, although there is an expectation that it will be tested later in 2023. UEFA introduced a similarly pared-down version of SAOT in the Champions League group stages this fall that used the Hawk-Eye optical camera system without the sensor-laden ball. Both UEFA and Serie A already use Hawk-Eye as their performance data provider.
Serie A and official technical partner Puma recently introduced a new winter match ball that would be used in January that did not mention any embedded technology. As of press time, neither Serie A nor the Italy’s soccer federation had returned inquiries seeking confirmation of the plan specifics.
Radar tracking technology company TrackMan is launching NEXT Golf Tour, a virtual professional tour open to anyone with access to TrackMan’s indoor golf simulators. Players will compete for a minimum purse of $100,000 during each 18-hole stroke play tournament, with the first of six 2023 events scheduled for Jan. 4.
Men and women with a handicap of 3.4 or better are encouraged to join NEXT, which has an entry fee of $130 per tournament and its first two events will each be capped at 250 competitors. The winner’s share of a 250-player NEXT Golf Tour event will be at least $17,000, and the top 30% of the field will receive a paycheck. Players will also receive cash prizes up to $6,000 for hitting the longest drive, longest birdie streak, and finishing with the best aggregate closest-to-pin score, with an additional $2,000 per tournament given to players who post top NEXT-related content on social media.
Each NEXT event will be played on a virtual course on TrackMan’s golf simulator, the first being the Jack Nicklaus Tournament Course at PGA West from Jan. 4-15. Subsequent rounds will be played at Marco Simone Golf & Country Club (Jan. 18–29), Medinah Country Club (Feb. 1–12), The Concession Golf Club (Feb. 15–26), and Adare Manor (March 8–19).
“I’ve met so many players who have the skills required to succeed in the pro game, but saw their journey cut short by the demands and costs of tour life,” TrackMan CEO Eldrup-Jørgensen said in a statement. “It doesn’t have to be this way. Our Virtual Golf technology has improved radically over the past several years. The time is right to try something new.”
The PGA Tour has a long-standing partnership with TrackMan to use the Danish company’s launch monitors, which consist of a 3D Doppler radar and optical cameras to capture metrics that power the league’s ShotLink system to provide data during broadcasts. TrackMan’s ball-flight tracking system has been used in baseball across high school, college, and MLB, as well as European soccer teams and NBC’s Sunday Night Football broadcasts.
The social media sports app Fivestar has expanded its executive staff by hiring former TB12 vice president Zach Jonas and former Major League Lacrosse star Kyle Harrison.
Designed as a safe place for athletes to post their highlights and not be subjected to caustic feedback, Fivestar allows users to rate/score sports videos in aggregate through proprietary algorithms. The maximum score is a 5, the lowest a 1 — and comments are not allowed.
“Look, one star is a positive rating,” Fivestar founder and CEO Erin McNeally told SportTechie in August. “That’s what we tell people. There’s nothing negative. You got one star.”
Jonas, who was Tom Brady’s VP for marketing and content back in 2017, will oversee Fivestar’s expansion in his role as Chief Growth Officer. Previously, Jonas raised mobile ad revenue for Meta and Twitter’s marquee brands such as Uber, Airbnb, Booking.com and Delta. At TB12, Jonas led the full digital experience for Brady’s mobile app and later co-founded a SaaS platform that was sold to Dapper Labs in 2021.
Harrison, whose title is VP of Business Development and Athlete Relations, played 17 years across two professional lacrosse leagues and will be charged with securing player partnerships and corporate sponsorship deals. As the startup’s athlete brand ambassador, Harrison will also drum up awareness of the app, accelerate the number of downloads and seek out other brand ambassadors.
Previous Fivestar brand ambassadors and consultants include lacrosse players Trevor Baptiste and Kylie Ohlmiller, skateboarders Ryan Decenzo and Deon Harris and the WNBA’s Angel McCoughtry.
MLB will trial an expansion to PitchCom this upcoming spring training that lets pitchers attach a remote to their belts for signaling pitch calls to catchers. Catchers were able to press buttons on a wrist-worn device last MLB season for pitchers to hear pitch requests via a bone-conduction earpiece inside their hat, but the added remote would enable two-way electronic communication via the pitcher and catcher.
Lindsey Adler of the Wall Street Journal reported news of MLB’s upcoming PitchCom remote experiment, which was confirmed in a tweet from PitchCom. MLB has not yet approved PitchCom’s pitcher transmitter for regular season games. PitchCom’s big-league debut saw voluntary adoption from all 30 clubs last season, with PitchCom co-founder John Hankins telling SBJ that between 90% and 95% of MLB pitchers were using the system by September.
“We’re excited to see how pitchers and clubs use this new capability next spring. This essentially allows a 2-way conversation between pitcher and catcher on strategy without any talking,” PitchCom, a small company in Arizona, wrote on Twitter.
MLB first tested PitchCom in 2021 during Low-A minor league games to combat sign stealing and help improve pace of play. Next spring training’s PitchCom experiment to let pitchers call pitches to catchers will come as MLB is also introducing a new pitch clock for its 2023 season.
MatSing is integrating its multi-beam lens antennas into seven venues during the college football bowl season, including the National Championship Game at SoFi Stadium on January 8th.
The company’s proprietary high-capacity radio frequency antennas, which are generally installed in the aerial infrastructure of stadiums, will provide crystal 4G LTE and 5G coverage for nine total games in those seven venues. Fans in parking lots or in nearby tailgate parties consequently will have pervasive bandwidth and connectivity to upload photos and videos and to share on social media.
Founded in 2005, MatSing’s lightweight antennas deploy an artificial dielectric polymer that mimics the human eye’s capacity to refract light and applies it to network transmissions. The company customarily installs 60 lens antennas per venue to cover the upper levels of the stadium, with each antenna disseminating up to 48 independent sectors to support C-Band and other frequencies.
The upgraded bowl games include half of the New Year’s Day contests and are as follows:
Overall, MatSing’s technology is deployed in 100 venues, including the last five Super Bowls, the 2021 Stanley Cup Finals at Tampa’s Amalie Arena, the annual Miami Grand Prix and a most recent integration this season at Acrisure Stadium, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers. The tech was also utilized during President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
The Web3 collectible platform Tezos and Red Bull Racing have parted ways just over a year after signing a promising blockchain partnership deal.
Tezos, which originally was pegged to design a series of NFTs for the Formula One racing team, claimed on a Twitter post Friday that it “decided not to renew the agreement with RBR as it was no longer in line with our current strategy.” However, considering the two sides reportedly had a multi-year agreement, there may have been other potential causes for the breakup.
Back in May of 2021, Tezos had not only been named Red Bull Racing’s official blockchain partner, but its branding was also displayed all over Red Bull cars. Since that time, however, there has been a devaluation of NFTs, as well as controversy in the crypto space with the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. In a recent show run, Tezos’ branding was no longer on Red Bull cars.
Red Bull is not bowing completely out of the Web3 space entirely. The team continues to have a partnership with the crypto exchange firm Bybit, which is still said to be worth $50 million annually. Meanwhile, Tezos is still in the midst of a multi-year deal with another F1 team, McLaren Racing, and earlier in 2022, signed a multi-year kit sponsorship agreement worth reportedly $27.2 million with Manchester United.
Earlier this year, Tezos also partnered with the streaming service FloSports to become the title sponsor for FloSports’ Who’s Number One series and its other wrestling and motor sport events. In 2021, Tezos reached an agreement with the New York Mets to display signage on Citi Field’s centerfield scoreboard.
Fantasy sports NFT company Sorare recorded 585,000 new sign-ups since launching its free-to-play World Cup game on Nov. 10. The over half a million registrations represent new users across Sorare’s entire gaming platform, including soccer, MLB, and NBA fantasy contests.
More than 608,000 accounts played Sorare: Global Cup 22, which the Paris-based company launched after it announced partnerships with 18 national soccer teams in November. The game lets fans collect and trade NFT cards of national team players and use them to build lineups for fantasy competitions. More than 37,000 private World Cup fantasy leagues were created on Sorare. Soccer content creator Fiago formed the largest private league with 27,000 users. Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, and Kevin De Bruyne were the top-three most drafted players on Sorare.
Messi and Mbappé are both investors and brand ambassadors for Sorare, which has more than 2 million users globally across its fantasy NFT games. Sorare has licensing partnerships with more than 300 sports organizations including league deals with the NBA, MLB, MLS, Serie A, and Bundesliga. The NBA has an equity stake in Sorare, which raised $680 million in Sept. 2021 at a $4.3 billion valuation.
Golf shot-tracking and wearables company Shot Scope has raised a $3.2 million (£2.7m) Series A funding round led by Guinness Ventures. Edinburgh-based Shot Scope will use its new funding to scale its sales efforts globally given its initial focus has been on the U.K. golf market.
Shot Scope’s products include laser rangefinders, GPS watches, and other handheld GPS devices that golfers can carry on courses to view more than 100 real-time shot-tracking metrics on club distances, approach shots, short game, putting, scoring, handicap benchmarking and strokes gained. Golfers can view their data on Shot Scope’s mobile app, which also provides shot analytics and hole maps for more than 36,000 golf courses around the world.
PWC advised Shot Scope during its new funding round, which included investments from the Scottish Investment Bank and the University of Edinburgh’s VC arm Old College Capital. Shot Scope reports having more than 100,000 users globally. The PGA of America’s championship events have permitted rangefinders and other distance-measuring devices since 2021, becoming the first major golf organizer to allow the on-course technology.
Genetics platform GENEFIT has made two influential hires to its executive team as it looks to attract athletes and teams with its proprietary software that connects a player’s physiological data with their genes.
Former LAFC head of strength and conditioning Daniel Guzman and former Inter Miami CF director of fitness and rehabilitation Tom Jobe are now part of a company — powered by 3×4 Genetics — that utilizes intelligent algorithms to help elite players better understand their bodies. Guzman will serve as Head of Enterprise Sales, while Jobe’s title is Enterprise Sales Lead.
GENEFIT — through its app — advises athletes on training, rehabilitation, injury management and diet by quantifying the correlation between a player’s physiology and genetics. The goal is to avoid the guesswork involved with training, recovery and injury prevention through personalized data that can be funneled to a player, their trainer or their coach.
The company also sells take-home genetic testing kits, where users collect DNA samples from inside their cheeks and mail them to 3×4 Genetics to be analyzed for gene insights on metabolism, inflammation, detoxification, fitness, weight, hormones, cognition and reactions to specific foods or supplements.
Both Guzman and Jobe previously crossed paths at LAFC, which in November became the first professional sports team to partner with 3×4 Genetics and to rely on its software platform that analyzes athlete’s genetic data. Before matriculating to LAFC, Guzman began his career with the Los Angeles Galaxy in 2014 as the youngest lead strength and conditioning coach in the MLS. He later became Head Performance Coach for the U.S. Men’s National team, orchestrating their strength and conditioning and recovery strategies throughout the team’s 1017 international competitions.
Jobe — before his stint with Inter Miami CF — was head of both sport science and strength and conditioning for LAFC. Prior to that, he held performance posts with the Miami Dolphins and San Francisco 49ers.
Fans attending World Cup matches in Qatar have had access to new augmented reality features showing real-time player data through the Stadium Experience tool within the FIFA+ app.
Anyone with a smartphone and FIFA+ can hold up his or her phone and the app calibrates by detecting the pitch. Throughout the match, the AR identifies players, offers metrics on their running speed and shots, recognizes team shape and possession and more. The FIFA+ app also offers additional features such as providing all the same video replay angles that the referee sees when consulting VAR.
FIFA rarely discloses its third-party vendors, but SportTechie has learned that Immersiv is powering the AR technology and Chyron’s TRACAB is providing the optical tracking data. TRACAB was the technology fueling the Electronic Performance Tracking System (EPTS) in 2018 when FIFA first permitted in-game access to the data. Earlier this year, Immersiv demonstrated its tech as part of the NHL Tech Showcase and has been a standing partner of the UEFA Champions League as well.
For this World Cup, FIFA introduced 11 new advanced metrics that have been utilized in broadcast and digital media coverage. Tracking data has also been made available for the first time directly to the athletes through the FIFA Player App; Johannes Holmüller, FIFA’s director of football technology and innovation, posted on LinkedIn that more than 400 players at the World Cup downloaded the app.
