Synergy Sports Technology is a technology company that provides a real-time, video-indexing statistical engine and online retrieval platform to the sports and entertainment industry.
Its services are used primarily by professional and amateur basketball teams. For example, every team in the National Basketball Association uses Synergy’s web-based services for, among other things, evaluating players for the draft, trades and free agency, developing the team’s own players and for scouting opponents. Synergy logs every possession of every basketball game according to team-specified criteria. Resulting data is then interlaced with league-generated stats to produce visual displays that provide intelligence on player and team tendencies.
Synergy’s “ontological” tagging methods (patent pending) provide flexibility and varied workflow functions. Clients can add their own tags to video from remote locations, enabling organizations to synchronously collaborate. At any time, clips can be saved to create custom edits. Once video and/or data is placed into the Synergy video platform, the company provides immediate Internet access to content, while managing the creation of automated and custom edits, stats displays, video e-mail functions, iPod transfers, and smart phone access as well as a number of consumer-facing applications.
There were two significant corporate developments in 2008. Synergy announced in July 2008 a multi-year licensing agreement with the NBA that will give NBA TV (the league’s 24-hour network), NBA.com and the league’s television partners access to Synergy products and services. Two months later, Synergy announced its partnership with EA Sports, which calls for the developer and publisher of interactive entertainment and games software to incorporate data from Synergy into its products.
Garrick Barr, a former member of the Phoenix Suns coaching staff, founded the company as Quantified Scouting Service in 1998. Six years later, the company was renamed Synergy and Barr was joined by co-founder Nils Lahr. Previously, Lahr had developed VXtreme streaming media solutions, which was later purchased by Microsoft and became a founding technology for Windows Media and MPEG4.