Frustration can lead to great solutions

What slightly frustrated me lately is scrolling up and down endlessly in the Youtube stream to look up a certain athlete for the ICF World Cups. Does it sound familiar? After a race day I would like to quickly check some runs. But mostly I end up not knowing which stream (A or B) to search in, or where to find the run in the stream. What an inefficiency! So I’ve quickly hacked together a solution 🙂

2016-canoe-slalom-video-ivrea

A few years ago I’ve build www.canoeliveresults.com out of the experience of needing to click to many times to find live result streams for the major races. So I build a platform gathering all live result links, adding responsive design, mobile specific content, search and social media optimisation, integrating live results and live video, and soon it became the to-go-to platform when looking for live results. But then the ICF restricted it’s content to their website and it was over more or less. I still find it a shame that video and results aren’t combined in one page, but hey, I understand the ICF needs the traffic. So, as you could read in the intro, I experienced a new situation, actually already since a long time…. finally I’ve build a small proof of concept last evening. There is much to improve and add, but it does the basics: you click on an athlete, and it will start playing the video feed from the right timestamp.This proof of concept has a simple listing of the result link with a video link. Future versions could have:
  1. Database to store all races, result data and timestamp
  2. API to communicate between back- and front-end
  3. Integration with Youtube API
  4. Automatic scraping of results
  5. User login to help adding the timestamps
  6. Video or sound recognition to automatically identify the timestamps
  7. Etc….
Let me know what you guys thinks. Based on the feedback I might build it out into a real system. But at the moment all the indexation of the timestamp is a manual process. So I would need people to support on this.So there it is, have a look at video.canoeliveresults.com.

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