(ATR) Dartfish co-founder and chief executive officer Victor Bergonzoli tells Around the Rings his video analytics platform is an essential tool for Olympic athletes.
"It is really understanding their needs and their processes," Bergonzoli tells ATR on the latest edition of ATRTV. "What you need to look at is how they train, how do they communicate and how can I improve what they are already doing – that’s what we do."
Founded in 1999 by Bergonzoli and Serge Ayer, Dartfish provides video solutions to athletes and corporations alike that allow them to capture video and enrich it with graphics, text, voiceover, frame selection, data and then upload the video to the internet.
"Video is essential in their training, in their practice and in their game and match analysis," says Bergonzoli.
"You say that an image is worth 1,000 words; well a video is worth a million. Having a naked video is sometimes not enough, you need to be able to look at it frame by frame, backwards and forwards and looking at what happened and being able then to communicate is very important."
These video analytic techniques are tools that baseball trainer C.J. Stewart tells ATR is a must have for his athletes.
"One of the things I did over 10 years ago to really self-differentiate myself was to use Dartfish," chief executive officer of Diamond Directors Stewart tells ATR.
"A lot of people pride themselves on what they see with the "golden eye" and their experience, but the Dartfish eye doesn’t lie. It’s going to tell us what we’re doing right, tell us what we’re doing wrong and truly track development."
While Stewart focuses on training baseball athletes at practice facilities such as D-BAT in Atlanta, Georgia, Bergonzoli says "there is not a sport where Dartfish cannot be used".
"The last Olympics in Rio, around 47 percent of the medals were won by people using Dartfish and in Sochi [2014] it was 68 percent," Bergonzoli tells ATR.
"For Dartfish, the Olympics are every day," he says. "For us it’s just a pleasure of seeing that the solutions we provide help them win medals, that’s it. We don’t win the medals ourselves, our clients do, and that’s very important to us."
Dartfish TV is one of a few video analytic platforms being utilized by Olympic and professional athletes around the globe, including Ubersense and Coach’s Eye. It is likely the percentage of athletes using these platforms continues to grow as athletes reach for more medals and new heights.
Watch the video below to learn more about the Dartfish process from Bergonzoli and Stewart.
Reported and written by Kevin Nutley, video by Courtney Colquitt.
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