NBA Highlights – Search for video of NBA plays | Hacker News Reader

NBA Highlights – Search for video of NBA plays

3ball.io

102 pointsMatetricks38 comments

I like the idea, but I'm having some trouble with it. Search results are only from this season, right? A search for Steve Nash showed a Steph Currey highlight as result one for me. More slang oriented searches like "dunked on" or "dunks on" don't really work either. Dunk/Dunks shows up in results, but nothing beyond that. Was looking for one of my all time favorite highlights, Baron Davis dunking on Kirilenko [1]. For me this type of thing would be pretty awesome with some sort of stats element. A 'visual box score' vs. 'highlights search engine.' ie show the box score for a game, and clicking in any particular field shows video of the plays that produced those stats.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYpwjB0IzoU

> A search for Steve Nash showed a Steph Currey highlight as result one for me

Presumably because Nash is on the warriors coaching staff.

I can't find any retired players, maybe you can. Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, etc. Pretty sure it's just this year for results.

I'm sure you're right, just meant to explain the connection between Nash & Curry.

Where is all the footage from? Is this allowed by the NBA? The quality of the footage is quite good.

This seems to be just searching the clip title. For example, if you search 'curry 3' ('curry three' returns nothing), it'll return things like "Curry 2' Finger Roll Layup (6 PTS) (Iguodala 3 AST)" or "Curry REBOUND (Off:0 Def:3)". If it could match the search query with play-by-play data, now THAT'd be cool.

>Is this allowed by the NBA?

The NBA may be the only US pro sports league that actually doesn't mind having highlights compiled and shared online. In fact, the current commissioner has said, "We’re incredibly protective of our live game rights, but for the most part highlights are marketing."[0]

[0]http://www.si.com/nba/2015/03/01/mit-sloan-sports-analytics-... (number 30)

My site (http://eaganr.com/nba/) used to do this. But they changed up their video URLs, wondering how Matetricks gets the new URLs.

I didn't build this, it's a site that's been trending on my news feed. Two people in my network built it over a weekend.

I would tell those 2 guys to build this out including parts that should be there but they need the data, etc, targeting it as a value-add service that Disney can sell to ESPN subscribers. Done properly with multiple sports over multiple years and consistent annotations, I would think sports fans would go nuts over this, wouldn't they? (Any sports fans here?) Like, think of the ability to jump immediately to the video of most any noteworthy event in a sports event in recent history - "hey, remember that time PlayerX did that funny fake tag out to PlayerY? Hey let's pull that up and watch it, grab this slider you can move it back and forth to see exactly how he pulled off that trick, hahaha awesome".

I think Disney has plenty enough in-house talent and they're usually pretty forward thinking, it's surprising they haven't done something along these lines.

I used to work at ESPN.com. My job application was a proof of concept of a similar idea, but because it was 2002 and wasn't possible to build technically it was designed to show that I could code and think creatively about consuming sports online.

When I took the job, the realities of licensing footage hot hard: the leagues were not keen on letting a third party like ESPN have historical, searchable footage like this available on demand. The leagues were still figuring not how to make money from digital and rights to their games are the biggest asset they have.

Things have changed since then but the tl; dr is that from 2002-2005 the reason this wasn't built by ESPN was not technical or due to a lack of imagination, but a business reason - it was prohibitively expensive / impossible to get licensing rights from the leagues.

I can see it working. Especially if it's community driven. Like use AI/machine learning to create the foundation for recognizing what event corresponds to which scene, and then have viewers be tagging or writing comments while the video is rolling

We're building exactly what you're describing at http://www.swish.io (available on both ios and android) We organize clips by plays, teams, and games and annotate videos using the meta data from the play-by-play. We even have the slo-mo slider capabilities you mention, if you check out our app you can press down on any video and move your finger back and forth to watch in slo-mo (works much better on iOS at the moment).

We source our content from social media, not from the league's sites so we do not have every play but we have a lot. Usually 30 or more per game.

If you're a sports fans try it out would love to hear your feedback!

"All NBA Plays"?

For example, this well circulated failed dunk attempt by Curry from earlier this season is not there: https://streamable.com/mntc

Found it. The queries have to match the naming of the video so I searched "Miss Curry Lakers": https://3ball.io/miss-curry-lakers/0021600238_233

I'm a big basketball fan (mostly college). Where are you sourcing the videos? Also, are you manually tagging each video with player names, teams, and keywords or is there some magic happening on the backend?

Just from a cursory glance at the results, it seems like they're simply providing a naive search on the play-by-play descriptions that the NBA provides (e.g. http://data.nba.net/data/10s/prod/v1/20161212/0021600366_pbp...). No computer vision behind-the-scenes magic, unfortunately.

> No computer vision behind-the-scenes magic, unfortunately.

Theoretically, it shouldn't be terribly technically difficult to attach a few sensors to each player to get a relatively hi-res 3D representation of each player's position throughout the game, should it?

Annotating the action accurately, not so easy, or might there be some trick?

This sort of happens already in NBA games. There's a system called SportVU that tracks XY positioning of players and XYZ positioning of the ball in real-time. Here's a decent article that describes it in more detail: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670059/moneyball-20-how-missile... . Unfortunately, the data is proprietary.

my impression, from having talked with people who analyze the data from sportVU, is that the raw data is fairly useless and most of the useful data crunching happens overnight after each game.

with that said, bluetooth beacons, along with 3 bluetooth receivers for triangulation, could be used for inexpensive player tracking, but the data would be noisy and not as accurate (probably ~1 ft resolution or so). i've actually been wanting to put such a system together to determine how good it might be.

Would be great if it could learn which were most likely to be highlight plays based on the number of times they were clicked. And then give those priority in the results list. Also, maybe prioritise a player's involvement in the play.

e.g., if I search "westbrook dunk", I probably don't want the normal dunks first, or the time he passed to someone else who then had the dunk. Show me the great Westbrook dunks first, then the normal ones, then the assists to other dunkers.

If you search for a player's name and the word pass you get all the videos with that player and that word in the title. That includes the ones where the pass was made by somebody else and the ones marked as bad pass, which are probably not what I'm interested in.

A suggestion: limit the search to the substring of the title between commas. It seems to always match a player with his play.

I can't say for sure this is what 3ball is using, but here is an XML file from NBA.com listing videos with associated titles, descriptions, thmbnails, and video urls.

http://www.nba.com/sitemap_videos_0001.xml

However it appears outdated since the dates only go up to 8/4/2016.

For all the people asking where it's from, quick google brought up http://www.nba.com/sitemap_videos_0001.xml and changing it to 0002 seemed to work. It's just an index of something from nba.com and nothing is hosted on the site.

You can get all the sitemaps here; http://www.nba.com/video_sitemap_index.xml

How were you able to find that sitemap? Is there one for stats.nba.com?

Not sure mate, but you can find a bunch through G; https://www.google.com.au/search?q=inurl%3Axml+site%3Anba.co...

I tried like 8 queries and none of them yielded a single relevant result. Most of them didn't yield a video at all. Granted, they were difficult/obscure, but didn't make a great impression.

If this needs some special syntax or keywords, you should let the user know.

Searched for "Kobe pass"

0 results lol

Would be pretty hilarious if the only result was the 81 point game.

Typed in "5x5", found nothing. However rare of a performance, Draymond pulled it off last season so it should be relatively recent.

This site appears to only have clips of individual plays, so neither a 5x5 nor a triple double would appear except as a long set of highlights. And not every play is a highlight; I checked a recent Russell Westbrook game and it had every assist but only about half of his scoring plays.

This is a fascinating tool but I can't imagine this will exist much longer after the NBA's lawyers find it.

The NBA is usually pretty good about letting fan videos of their content exist.. compared to the NFL at least.

Also videos of every play are available as clips on the NBA site, this just seems like a more searchable version.

How I can find who made this? Would love to work w/ him/her on a project.

http://twitter.com/canzhiye

And by Zhi P

also @notzhipan

cool stuff...

every letter search becomes a new route.. yikes that is awful for going back

also, I searched for ginobili assist but it found all plays with ginobili and any assist.

good start and the video quality is pretty strong on mobile

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