OCSL's eye for the Tigers

Winner of the May CRN/Syscap Technology Innovator of the Month award

A solution that tackles digital video to give Leicester Tigers rugby union team a quick review facility for key moves has been named the winner of the May CRN/Syscap Technology Innovator of the Month award.

Developed and delivered by Sussex media solutions specialist OCSL, the system enables the coaching staff to collect digital video images of games and review them in detail seconds later.

OCSL has employed a combination of bespoke software (written in Perl) and specially tailored rugged hardware running Linux, to deliver the complete solution.

Jane Ayres, OCSL director, said the project had been a considerable challenge. "There was no clear brief from the Tigers and we were responding to direct requests to enhance or change the solution," she said.

"We started with Unix but the hardware was too large, and we had to create a robust solution that would be weather-proof."

The main hardware also had to be suitable for travel to away matches, and it had to fit into a small space. Most critically, the Tigers wanted content to be usable immediately and at the end of the game for reviews of specific plays.

Dean Richards, director of rugby at Leicester Tigers, said: "We came up with the idea of having a system.

Then, having talked to OCSL to see what we could do, we decided to develop it to meet our every need."

Meeting the Tigers' every need meant providing enough video feeds to get angles on all the key passages of the game, as well as a very fast and easy-to-use playback and editing process.

The Tigers do not have IT experts on their staff, but during games the system is operated by players who have been sidelined by injury.

The system was originally developed from the ground up for the Tigers. OCSL has now packaged it and named it GameReVu, and a number of other rugby clubs and leading football clubs are showing an interest.