Football is a resource-intensive sport. The strategy and people power that help bring a team into top shape are enormous. Playbooks look like phone books and the hours of game and practice footage are difficult to distribute to teams and coaching staff. Many teams, however, have gotten an edge by using Hudl, a platform that offers secure access to video analysis tools from any computer or mobile device. The MongoDB-based platform makes it easy to upload, sort, analyze and share video to help coaches learn about their teams, scout opponents and win.
After facing bottlenecks with SQL, Hudl turned to MongoDB to support its video metadata storage. MongoDB delivers a flexible data model, ensuring coaches are not restricted when defining variable data, such as football formations, camera angles, and custom notes used for post-game analysis. With MongoDB, Hudl can create a single collection with high-speed querying, while easily and cost-effectively sharding to scale linearly. “Rather than partitioning SQL, we decided to invest in horizontal scale for the long term,” said Brian Kaiser, CTO at Hudl. “MongoDB makes it so easy to add shards that we don’t require a large capital expenditure to upgrade, which is great from a predictability point of view. Together with Amazon’s Provisioned IOPS, MongoDB delivers remarkably stable query.”
MongoDB has increased developer productivity by facilitating Hudl’s A/B testing and enabling the incremental, easy rollout of new features. In addition, Hudl relies on MongoDB Management Service (MMS) as a crucial asset to monitor MongoDB clusters and proactively address deployment issues. “MongoDB is painless for developers and has proven to be battle-tested for the web-based video analysis that Hudl requires,” said Kaiser. “We appreciate having a strong company that backs the product with great support and a high level of innovation.”
Since 2001, over 225,000 recruiting packages have been sent through Hudl, and over 25,000 college coaches have watched recruiting films through Hudl. We hope to see more from the Hudl team as they change the way athletes, coaches and recruiters build talent.