Hudl's sporting strategy for expansion: create startups within startups

Sports video analytics company is growing fast by keeping a small company culture, says VP engineering Jon Dokulil

Hudl is a video distribution and analytics company that provides tools to sports people and coaches to edit, share and analyse footage across multiple devices. Coaches are able to tag and annotate the video, and then share it over the web with individual players in order to help them evaluate their performance. Individuals can also use it to advertise their sporting prowess on the internet.

Founded in 2006 and originally focused on American football, Hudl has now expanded its operations to cover football, rugby, basketball, volleyball and golf. It has operations in 12 countries across five continents. VP engineering Jon Dokulil (pictured below) explained that the firm's services are now deployed by all of the football clubs in the English Premier League and that it counts 40 UK-based developers and salespeople among its 430 staff, through an acquisition in 2014 of London-based ReplayAnalysis.

Premiership teams and other elite sports clubs tend to film with expensive 4K video and run it through video analytics to look in detail at players' biometrics, performance and gameplay, but Hudl wants to bring the same capabilities to HD video, making it accessible to smaller outfits. And it's not all about the high-end analytics, said Dokulil, simply enabling sports people to study their own performance on video is a powerful tool.

"A lot of what we do is simply saving time, so coaches spend less time looking at a screen and more talking to players," he said.

While the firm's software has a wide range of potential uses, Hudl is sticking firmly to sports. This has helped the software developers stay focused, working in small teams of five to eight people, each with its own specialism.

"As the company has grown we've added teams and each team is focused on a specific opportunity, so a certain sport or even within a sport some specific feature," Dokulil explained.

"A DevOps culture allows those teams to operate like little businesses, startups within a startup. As much as possible we empower them to do things themselves."

This approach requires developer-friendly software, so that the teams can be independent without the need to defer to experts in any particular area.

Hudl's software is based on Microsoft's .Net framework, with nginx for load balancing, RabbitMQ for messaging and "a lot of Amazon's cloud services". For the database the company uses MongoDB, chosen because it is familiar to many developers, because the document model fits in with the architecture, and because it can scale.

"For us it's the ability to go from being very small, which is important for microservices, but then if a product catches on you can scale up very easily,"

Expanding globally has not been without its challenges for the software team. The move to microservices is a challenge in terms of implementing business logic, Dokulil said, and the distributed architecture requires some organisation.

"Instead of running a few big database servers we're running lots of small ones. As we expand globally it's figuring out how we distribute one database geographically and yet have it optimised for each region."